The Real World: A Redundancy
I wanna run through the halls of my high school
I wanna scream at the top of my lungs
I just found out there’s no such thing as the real world
Just a lie you’ve got to rise above
- John Mayer
I’ve been thinking lately about that oft-heard and oft-uttered phrase “the real world.” I don’t like it. For one thing, the term has become a cliché. I don’t mind a cliché if I think it expresses a fundamental truth, which many clichés do, and which explains how they’ve become clichés in the first place. Unfortunately, this particular overused term does no such thing. In fact, as I see it, the phrase “the real world” promotes a way of approaching life that is, if not actively harmful, decidedly uninformed. Let me explain.
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What is the opposite of “real”? “Unreal,” “imaginary,” “fake” – take your pick. So the opposite of “the real world” can, in other words, fairly be called “the fake world.” Imagine if such a term existed. It sounds funny, doesn’t it? Certainly no one would ever use it in conversation, and with good reason. However, the very existence of the phrase “the real world” implies the existence of its opposite phrase, and that’s where we run into problems.
Consider this: young people are constantly being told that they must prepare for “the real world.” Children hear this before they even hit puberty. Through the use of this phrase, children and teens alike are being sent a message: namely, that their current lives, their current existences, are simply not important or legitimate. They are, rather, fake. Life before college graduation is just a lark, an exercise in superficiality and, indeed, meaninglessness.
By constantly foisting the term “the real world” upon youths, adults instill in them, purposefully or not, the belief that their lives, prior to reaching certain milestones, are simply filler for what’s to eventually come, even if that “eventually” is a long way off. Infancy, childhood, and adolescence? Mere placeholders. Life doesn’t begin until you set off on your own and have to make money for yourself, or didn’t you know? Alternately, as a fourth grade teacher may tell her students, it is fifth grade when things really get tough, and may God have mercy on those souls who haven’t worked their butts off in class this year in mastering long division.
The thing is, of course, this is almost exactly what the fifth grade teacher is telling her students about the sixth grade. Best be fully prepared, because pre-junior high is absolutely vicious. Teachers will have no mercy on you. (Funnily enough, however, it turns out that each year, teachers remain capable of showing mercy and even empathy; and at the same time, each year they provide their classes with dark premonitions about the upcoming grade.)
I don’t mean to demonize teachers for often taking this route with their students: it’s understandable, though not excusable, that they do so. Keeping children motivated in the classroom is undoubtedly hard work, and seeing students display a lack of diligence is undoubtedly frustrating. But essentially scaring children into working harder is not the prudent way to deal with issues of deficient motivation, especially when these scare tactics carry with them an implicit devaluation of kids’ lives.
Consider the following quote by that wise old muppet Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back. The Jedi Master says, in reference to the young, eager-for-adventure Luke Skywalker: “All his life has he looked away, to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was, hmm, what he was doing. Hmmph.”
Yoda said it right. Where, in today’s über-fast, forward-obsessed world, is the focus on the here and now? It is undoubtedly important to plan ahead, and to set up and work toward long-term goals; but to sacrifice the quality of one’s present, or to deny the very validity of one’s present, in the name of one’s eventual, may-or-may-not-come-true future? That’s no good.
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For most of my sophomore year at Bridgewater-Raynham Regional High School, my life sucked. School sucked, and school was the primary feature of my life, along with family. I dreamt of dropping out once I turned sixteen in order to join the Peace Corps. There, I thought, I’d have a chance to actually “make a difference” and really “do something with my life.” School was becoming more and more about tests and grades and their impact on one’s chances of getting into a so-called good college. Sophomore year was, in other words, about future, non-present things. I felt like my life was becoming meaningless, in a tragic way thus affirming the subconscious messages teachers had instilled in me and my peers in prior years whenever they employed the “real world” concept. Your life isn’t real yet; you’re not old enough to be real. This year? It’s just a drill. Tread water; it’s all you can do for the time being, after all.
Before the year was up, though, things changed a bit. I did a lot of thinking about my fifth grade teacher, who had died when I was in eighth grade. He was one of those teachers, the seemingly rare ones who are truly able to “make a difference.” I thought about why it was that Mr. Mitchell was such an impactful and effective educator. I thought about the nature of his life’s work – a life which, incidentally, ended abruptly at the age of fifty-six due to a heart attack. What was it, exactly, that Mr. Mitchell did with his life? And how?
It took me a while, but eventually I figured out what it all came down to: Mr. Mitchell didn’t wait for the future to arrive. He understood that we live in the present. We can’t help but live in the present. The future never arrives; the present merely shifts in time, and all of us along with it.
Mr. Mitchell had esophageal cancer in his thirties, and after he survived that, he viewed each day as a blessing. He had one abiding piece of advice for his colleagues: “When you get home, hug your children, and tell them that you love them.”
And so I realized: I don’t need to join the Peace Corps to “make a difference” in the world – after all, B-R High School is as much a part of the world as anywhere else on the globe! I don’t need to wait around for opportunities to “do something with my life,” regardless of what adults might tell me. I could die tomorrow – unlikely, perhaps, but true. I can’t take the here and now for granted. I have to do what I can to better the world around me, and if that means work to improve B-R for the next two years, so be it. I can do that. I should do that. I’ll start today.
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In his 2007 book The Power of Play, child psychologist David Elkind states that children should be perceived not as human beings, but as human becomings. In truth, however, we are all, irrespective of our age and the environment we find ourselves in – whether it’s a school, workplace, or home – both beings and becomings. We are all simultaneously finished products and works in progress.
That is to say – striving for a better tomorrow is good. Goals are good. But we’ve got to remember that the only time we have to make a difference is now, whether we’re fifteen or we’re fifty. Everyone, regardless of age, has the capacity to enact positive change. It’s not a matter of scale – the issue isn’t how much progress is made, only that it is made – but, rather, of timing. Start living, being, becoming, and making a difference today, since today is all we’ve ever got to work with in this world. For real.
October 27 2009 02:31 pm | JB's Sober Thoughts