Musings on the "Real World", or You're Already There, my Friend.

I can't say if the concept of "delaying the real world" was made popular by Collen Kinder, but the phrase certainly was. It seems that more and more people are "delaying the real world" in hopes of something more rewarding. Why? I dunno. Maybe our generation is lazy and foolish. Maybe we've watched our parents' job-related unhappiness fester for too long. Maybe delaying the real world is just new hype on a very old story.

You can't answer a question like "why?" without first defining "what?". So what is the real world? What makes your post-graduation life "real" in comparison to your madcap college days? MTV never seemed to find much of a difference, anyway.

Here's the way I understand it. The real world involves most or all of the following: a belief that you are an adult, a belief that adults have "real jobs", a steady paycheck, a 9-5 schedule, Tuesday morning sales meetings, a 401k, commuting, marriage, kids, retirement, death and most importantly, a cubicle. That's the real world, that's the scary-ass fate that awaits us once we toss up our mortarboards and eat our last graduation weekend mini-quiche. Right?

Get real! Every part of your stupid little life is your real life, this is your real world. All of childhood, all of college and God forbid, everything you do after college. It's all you've got to work with. So it doesn't matter if you sign up for a 401k and a i-banker's salary at JP Morgan, or if you hop on a boat and sail down to Peru to help orphans. Both are very real, very important parts of the world. Referring to one path as "real" automatically implies that the other is somehow unreal. And for so many reasons, that is whack.

Placing disproportionate values on jobs has landed us with too many lawyers, politicians and celebrities and too few teachers, nurses and community organizers. It's also left my entire generation with a complex. We're trying to balance an impossible set of scales. On one side we measure trading our souls for the security of 9 to 5 jobs and the beginnings of student loan payments. On the other side, travel, adventure, a job that doesn't pay well and makes your heart sing, and a whole lot of pressure and ridicule. For being lazy, or quixotic, or selfish, or unrealistic. For being young at the turn of the millennium. We're trying to be practical and true to ourselves and trying to find something that matters and something that makes money - ideally something that does all of that. Those are the choices we're trying to balance.

"But it's not cut and dry like that, fool!" you cry. Of course it isn't. And that's my point. I've had friend after keyboard-hunched friend ask me a few variations of one theme: what's it like to be a grown-up in the real world? I don't know - but it feels a lot like being a kid in college, don't you think?

I don't want to delay or fight the real world anymore, I want to change the conversation and the vocabulary. I want to know how your life is, not your new life as an adult. I want to hear about what you're doing, the honest-to-goodness valuable thing in your life, not "the real world". Because let's face it. Regardless of where you are in your life, this is the real world and you're in it. And there's no way to delay what's already in progress.