Everyone’s heard of it, “senioritis.”

You hit your senior year and then you just can’t be bothered to do anything. You skip classes, you barely turn in work, doing the bare minimum in order to actually get to graduation.

Except that isn’t what senioritis really is. It’s the people who have spent the last 4 years of their lives working themselves to the bone to get a degree.

It’s the people who have been in the same education system since they were 5 constantly being asked “are you ready for the real world yet?”

It’s people who have been living like adults and working like adults, but who still can’t get treated like adults.

It’s people who are about to cross the threshold into a new phase of their lives and they’re already exhausted.

Constantly being asked about the real world by adults who set up an education system that doesn’t prepare students for the real world anymore.

They can work multiple jobs, keep themselves alive, do almost anything that any working adult would do, all while maintaining their education, but they still aren’t considered people who are a part of the real world.

When they’re inevitably burnt out from doing so many things to keep up with the flow of the life of a college student and maintain their lives as adults, they don’t get the same treatment that other adults do.

They get “Welcome to the real world” when they’re exhausted, even though in that same breath they’ll get told “You don’t know anything. You’re too young to know anything.”

It seems like the “real world” can’t make up its mind about where college students, especially college seniors, belong.

One second they’re being called children, the next second they’re being told that they’re adults.

That’s the exhausting thing. Never knowing what place you really have in the world because the people in charge of that world can’t make up their minds.

Exhausted and burnt out all because of a system that doesn’t put existing as a person first anymore.

That’s what senioritis really is.