Getting Real About the Real World

What is the ‘real’ world?

I’ve found myself often saying this cliché about people. ‘So and so needs to get into the real world.”

So I’ve wondered why do I, and others keep using this expression?

It is most usually a criticism. Someone is being ‘unrealistic’. They are out of touch, lost in their own world, or not in touch with others.

So here’s what I really think.

Our modern world has made us increasingly separate from one another. And so we think our worlds’ look quite different from each other. We justify our own point of view through judgement and comparison to others.

We spent more and more time, in the western world anyway, doing abstract stuff staying remote in front of screens, not people, using our hands on key boards, a mouse, a remote. We spend more time in the virtual world than the ‘real time’ world.

We are educated to think and act through narrow educational lenses; to regurgitate and not to make things and experience things.
We value how people appear on paper with qualifications and abstract achievements, more than we value people’s experience good and bad.

But actually, our every living moment is the real world. The instant we embrace difference in others, diverse actions and thought, everything becomes one ‘real’ world.

If we are judging others, or even ourselves for not living in the real world, we are not honouring our experience of it, good and bad, happy and sad, failure and success. It’s all pretty goddamn real!!

In an interview David Bowie once answered the question: What is your greatest achievement? His answer was: “Discovering morning.”

Honour every experience.

Get real.