Preparing for The Real World
My advice to college students
Last weekend, I had the chance to talk to some college students from Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University about work, meaning, and what we want to be when we grow up. Much of my talk centered on material that we’ve discussed here time and time again—bad faith, good leisure, and why work and life often feel so disconnected—though I tried to tailor it towards someone just entering “The Real World” for the first time.
I’m posting an abridged version of that talk focused on making sense of The Real World and preparing for it. Though it’s meant for students, I hope it’s relevant for people in any stage of life. Without further ado, here’s my advice to students (and, hopefully, to everyone):
How to Prepare for The Real World
You are going to face a lot of uncomfortable questions as you prepare to enter The Real World. Obviously, there will be “practical” questions about work, relationships, community, and so on—what will you do? Who will you marry? Where will you live?
It’s easy to reduce The Real World to these responsibilities. It’s the time when your mistakes really count—there’s nobody protecting you any more and you don't have any excuses. The Real World is practical: it’s where you face Real questions about life and where you finally have to be a Real adult. At long last, it’s time to grow up.
And now, it’s time to start answering the most important questions. In the end, you’ll find that just about all of these boil down to, “Who (or what) am I?” If, when all’s said and done, you have a complete and rational answer to this question, you probably lived a good life.
But this is a hard question, one that demands hard work. It’s not just about philosophizing and arguing. A good answer comes through living life attentively and intentionally. This can be painful. It’s frustrating. It demands patience and attention—and attention is especially scarce and precious in our digital day and age.
When we’re faced with these very serious problems, we don’t want to confront them. We want to procrastinate as much as possible. In the short term, we can do that by finding quick distractions. It’s easy to just ignore the seriousness of your life’s problems by letting something else take over: if you can just focus on a video game, a movie, or whatever your escape of choice might be, those huge issues are—at least temporarily—put off to the side.
But you will inevitably learn that all of your short-term answers—and your long-term ones as well—are very fragile. “Just ignore it” is not going to work. I’d like to tell a little story: like any good philosophy student, I spent most of my college days coming up with random questions to start arguments with friends. There was one question that did a lot more damage than I expected or intended it to: a then-distant friend of mine (and later my roommate) was talking to me about his horrible memory. All the time, he forgot things—little things, big things, names, faces—when we were roommates, he would regularly forgot my name despite sharing a room for a year.
Without really thinking about it, I asked him, “Are you living life too passively?”
To me, that was nothing more than a joke. A few months later, he came up to me and reminded me of the story—unlike most things, he had actually remembered it. He told me that I had unintentionally traumatized him. Almost every day since then, he’d asked himself whether he was letting life happen to him and just ignoring it.
I like this story, because it’s a good reminder that incredibly small things can show just how desperate we are for meaning. Your world is probably a lot more fragile than you want it to be. One poorly timed question—or well-timed question, depending on your perspective—can make you rethink everything. And that’s scary. I want to be open to changing my mind, but I can’t say I like it.
When these moments of insecurity happen, you once more have a choice: you can confront the problem, or you can find a new and improved distraction. That might be doubling down on your addictions, genuinely turning over your life to drugs, alcohol, video games, or whatever else you might choose. But it’s also these moments where reducing life’s big questions becomes so appealing.
Earlier, we talked about a few of those “practical” questions as you enter The Real World: things about work, relationships, and community. Sure, these are hard questions, but they’re a lot easier to figure out than that overwhelming question of, “Who am I?” What if you could just answer one of those questions and be done with it?
At worst, these questions become distractions from that wider life-spanning question. We’re hunting for things that can let us act as though we’re all done and don’t have to think about these questions, because thinking about them can be so frustrating.
Maybe this will be total identification with a particular cause—some kind of political or social movement. Maybe you’ll convince yourself that you just need a relationship: if you met the right person, everything would disappear.
Very often, we’ll try to reduce these questions to work. If you’re someone who’s worked very hard to get where you are, you’re going to want to show that to prove who you are. When we feel insecure and uncertain, we want to make sure people know just how hard we work and how successful we’ve been.
And it is, of course, much easier to see what someone does than to see what someone is. Trying to describe the communities where you belong, the people you love, the things you find beautiful, and the ultimate purpose of your life…is kind of embarrassing. It’s hard. You’ll rarely feel like you’re using the right words or saying things the right way, and you will invariably wonder if the other person cares at all.
What we want is a set of instructions: a single set answer that we can just repeat by memory without ever considering at a deeper level. “I am an engineer” is a very easy answer to a very difficult question. And when the rest of life starts challenging you, it’s easy to fall back to this default of work: if you feel purposeless, go put in a few extra hours at the office. If you feel lonely, do some work on a Saturday. If you get the feeling that there has to be something more to life, start grinding for a promotion.
This Real World isn’t real at all. It’s a way of avoiding the biggest questions of all. Practical questions must be answered, but if you’re convinced Real Life is just practical questions, you’ve been sold a lie. Real life is about learning who you are in the fullest