the false promise of “the real world”

made w/ midjourney

When I was a kid, adults including my dad often talked in dark tones about “the real world.” The idea was that kids live in a cushioned fantasy. They should enjoy that fantasy and fear the arrival of reality. That fear should spark their respect and gratitude for those living in the real world (adults) and prompt their diligent preparation for their own enrollment in it. It feels a little patronizing to spell this attitude out because of how commonplace it was at the time and may still be now.

I this this is a busted paradigm with unfortunate staying power. It is rooted in anxiety and those roots, like tree roots, thicken and grasp with greater strength over time. It can be seductive, still, to think that your entry level employees, your first-time managers, you and your co-founders aren’t yet operating in the real world. You’re just novices toddling inside a sandbox someone else built. 

An alternative: the world kids and novices live in is altogether real. It is possibly the realest world they’ll ever experience. Their job isn’t to sit in tremulous gratitude, waiting for pretend to end. It’s to learn as much as they can. The job of their parents and managers isn’t to protect the eggshell surface of the idyll. It’s to challenge them, safely, so the next season of reality is a change of weather in a familiar landscape instead of a dangerous shock. 

-eric