Are You Living In The Real World?

 You were set up to fail.

You were lied to.
It started in Kindergarten. You were told that if you did well in Kindergarten, you would move into First Grade. Of course, the idea of First Grade was appealing to your little Kindergarten self, so you worked hard on your play-do sculptures and alphabet recitations and snack time. You mastered these essential skills and moved on to First Grade, where you were told that if you did well, you would move into Second Grade.

The cycle repeated itself until you got into Junior High. By then, school had been so boring and droll that you just couldn’t wait to get out. So you were told that if you did well in Junior High School you would go into High School, and you would be that much closer to The End. So you make your way through Junior High and High School, just waiting for The End, so that you can get to The Beginning.

The Beginning of your life, of your freedom. You start with college, studying what you want, when you want, so that you can finish up there and be what you want. You’re waiting for The End of college, so that you can get to The Beginning of the rest of your life.

So you graduate, and you start work, and before you know it, you’re in your 40’s, working in management, sitting at a desk with a gut from too much sitting and a flatulence problem. You’re counting the days until your retirement. You’re waiting for The End of your work life, so that you can get to The Beginning of your retirement.

Only, by the time you retire, you’re too old and tired to enjoy any of the stuff that you finally have time to do. And in today’s economy, you may not have the money to do that anyway. And if you squander your time, soon you’re looking at The End with no new beginning in sight.

This is The Real World, and the belief that we, as humans, should live in this world is the beginning of the lie that we’ve been told since we were five. That if you work hard, you can move forward, onto the next opportunity to work hard, with little reward or relief in sight, until you’re too old to enjoy your reward.

Is this where you want to live? Is this the lesson that you want to pass on to your children?

What did you do, today, that was unique?

That may seem like a difficult question. Rephrased, what did you do today, that was different than the roughly 10,000 or so days that you’ve lived before? Did you do something that made people recognize you as an individual? Or are you too afraid, living in The Real World, to truly set yourself apart?

Here’s the deal. You were made to be individual. To be unique. To take chances. To jump.

You were not made to sit in a cube all day. You were not made to have knee pain all of the time because your career demanded your body and your soul. You were not made to be living paycheck to paycheck, hoping that the car doesn’t break down or that you won’t need to come up with money for a co-pay if one of the kids gets sick.

You’re making yourself a bet, right now.

You’re betting yourself that you can craft a good future for yourself, by sacrificing yourself now. That if you just keep grinding, 40 or 50 or 60 hours a week, you’ll make it to retirement, and be able to live a decent life with a good house and maybe a little boat that you can fish off of, and hopefully you can do that without having to work as a greeter at Walmart to put groceries on the table.

So far, you’re losing that bet.

It’s okay to make a sacrifice for the short term. We’ve all been in situations where we needed to pick up a little overtime because the car broke down or we needed to take the co-pay for the doctor’s visit out of the grocery money. These were temporary situations, and as soon as we worked our way out of them, we tried to get back to our regular schedule.

But even with a regular schedule, you’re killing yourself right now, trying to earn enough to make it to retirement. You’re working your tail off, for what? The privilege of making it to retirement with false teeth and dying hopes? If you don’t make a change, and stop living in The Real World, that’s all you’re ever going to have to look forward to.

You may not see a way out of it right now. You may be so exhausted, so buried in this pit of despair, thinking to yourself “Oh crap, I’m broke.”

Do you remember those days when you were younger? Before kids, a mortgage and a minivan sucked all the life right out of you? Well, that may not have been what did it, but some days, it sure feels like it. Anyway. Back then, you were a risk taker. Sometimes, you leaped before you looked. Yet here you are, still with us, ready to kick ass and take names. You got so tied up in paying the bills and fixing the house and changing the diapers that you forgot what it was like to leap before you looked.

The truth is, though, that you’re never going to be able to re-capture that person that you used to be, if you don’t take a few chances. You have to walk to the very edge of that cliff, and look down. It may seem like a scary place to be. But, you’re never going to know what it feels like to really succeed, if you don’t jump.

You can keep working, making a bet with yourself, and a promise to the future, or you can keep working, live in the present, and work towards shaping the kind of future that you want to have.

The most dangerous risk of all:
The risk of spending your life
Not doing what you want on the bet
You can buy yourself the freedom to do it later
Alan Watts