My friend Joseph recently told me a story about someone he knows in his hometown. This person complained, it seemed, when people didn’t talk about “real” things. To her, “real” meant purely things like “sex” and other personal details. This got us on to the topic of what people really do mean when they say “the real world.” I have been unfortunate to have heard it most of my life, mainly from my father. I, of course, understand that, my father being very practical and having a romantic for son, he would want to instill in me a grounded outlook on life, rather than the outlook I held in high school (which was rather up in the clouds).
Yet, as probably every (or most) teenager, when my dad said left, I said right. When he said “One day you’re going to have to join the real world,” I staunchly replied “No I won’t” without truly understanding him or what he meant.
When graduating from high school I heard the phrase more, and so too when graduating from college. Then, when leaving Japan, I heard it more: “Well, time to get back to the real world” or “Time you got a job and entered the real world, huh?” In the end, though, what exactly does that phrase “the real world” mean? Is getting a job “the real world?” Is not being in school more “real” than being in it? When we begin to pay our own taxes, do we immediately enter a world more “real” than when we didn’t?
In the end, everything people mean when they refer to a “real world” is cultural. For what, truly, is real? Is sitting at a desk real? Sure, but is it more real than walking in the forest? Or spending a lazy afternoon in the sun? Sadly, though, it seems that whenever a person uses the phrase “the real world” their voices have a hint (at least) of depression. The “real world” is something that must be taken, not enjoyed. Lived, but not thrived in. Succumb to, not choose openly. To enter the “real world” is to suffer it.
Of course we all must, in the end, eat (at the base of life), and therefore we all need to have some way of getting food, and thus do really need jobs. And not all jobs are horrible things; this is not what I’m saying. I’m writing about how people see life, for when the phrase “real world” appears, generally people are talking about anything but the actual real world. The world has its ups and downs, its sufferings and its horrors; this is well understood. But we have one life to live, and to live it believing that we must succumb to some culturally accepted idea of how the world works is ludicrous. Give me a thick book before a cubicle; my soul thirsts more than my longing to please American culture. For it is our developments, our growth, how we thrive on the very air we breathe that is real.
My father retired from his job a few years back, happy about the years he put in yet wishing for some rest. Now he plays golf and takes care of two dogs. If asked, he would still probably claim that some “real world” existed out there, maybe among the economic types, maybe in business, maybe just out in the tax-payer society. Yet I know that he loved his job not because it was “the real world,” but because he loved his job. That is why he can retire without regrets, and that is why, I think, he is living happily now. I hope to one day do the same.
