I have just begun my freshman year of college, which makes me a consumer of everything, but an expert on nothing. I have braved a world that is believed to be laden with pretentious academics, Birkenstocks, jargon and colloquialism exclusive to the quiet panic of the millennial generation and the sloth which others attribute to us. But beyond the short cuts, beyond the circuitous back routes we take that leads us to the same place, lurks the common thought process that our lives have just begun now, that all the events prior to starting college are part of our past lives, that we are now in the “real world.”
The concept of the “real world” is an idea that I have witnessed being hinted at throughout teenage rhetoric. “When am I ever going to use that in real life?” “Real world” rhetoric is a way of discounting prior experience and events, and inflating the present, adult life, as the sole measure of our worth, where the path to growth and success is not a journey but a competition to find a job, secure an internship, and ultimately, “grow up.”
Our journey into the “real world” is often associated with fresh starts, the idea of leaving our “old” selves behind, and embracing the elusive idea of the great unknown with a façade of bravado. It is a subscription to the belief that once I get to college, once I get out of high school, I will be an entirely different person.
When I hear the utterings of beginning anew and finally being able to start a life that is separate from high school, I wonder what we are running from and what we wish to escape. Friends, labels, homework and rote memorization laden academia? Probably, but some of these things that we try so hard to escape are done in vane. In our quest for fresh starts and entry into the “real world,” that is, the world beyond high school, we are trying to escape something that is commonplace and more ubiquitous than imagined, reminding us that our circumstances are not as unique nor as singular as we think—neither of which are bad things. In some ways, the real world in which we journey is an extension of “the grass is always greener on the other side” phenomena, and time and experience tells us that this maxim proves to be a fallacy when the grass we arrive at is as weathered and as riddled in weeds and fungi as the one that we have just departed from.
College should be a place of growth, emotional, social, or physical if you subscribe to the belief in the “Freshman 15.” But it shouldn’t be inflated to be our ultimate journey in life, the place where we finally “find” ourselves, and our best friends—sure, this may happen, but it is also okay if it does not.
It is my entreaty that as college students and beyond we avoid entrapment into the “real world” abyss and the hollow promises of fresh starts. No start is fresh for we are bringing the bodies and burdens which have shaped us into who we are, and the delights of our past along with us. The task is not to rid ourselves of these burdens, to forget about them, and cast them into oblivion, but to know that there is no need to forget what has never fully defined us anyway. The “real world” has always been: it is now, it was then, and it will continue to be. All of our time matters, not just the time after high school.