Yeah I remember a constant trend in my child->young adult years was hearing "oh you think it's hard now? wait until you get to "next thing"'.

Every single time without fail (except maybe the jump from kindergarten to school) what actually happened was that the adults around me breathed down my neck a little bit less and I got access to a little more freedom to do fun stuff.

Being a kid in school is horrible. You're entirely reliant on your parents to buy you everything and enable you to experience things, nobody trusts you, everything is full of arbitrary rules.

The jump from school to university was especially stark - I kept being told it was going to be really hard, I'd need to work way harder than in highschool etc etc. Turns out what actually happened was I went from 6 straight hours of unavoidable class a day to maybe 2 or 3 much more interesting ones that were recorded and posted online and could be skipped when needed with no consequence, roughly the same amount of homework and I got to live with people my age 5 minutes walk from a 24 hour McDonalds.

And working... they pay you quite a lot of money to be there (seriously even a minimum wage job is unfathomable to a kid, do you know how many gameboys you could buy with that?), there's no homework and you get to do something you're really good at.