schweblog

With the impending graduation, I’m finally realizing that there is a real world out there that exists and lives and breathes and pollutes and cries and belches. That, on any given day, millions of people work billions of hours, usually in places they don’t like or, at the very least, would avoid if given the option. I’m finally at that point where that impasse is becoming inescapable. With each passing day, I am forced closer to the precipice of the real world.

Up to this point, I’ve spent the better part of my life absorbed with schooling, in some way, shape, or form. College, high school, and all the stuff that precedes it is essentially the same thing: do X, Y, and Z and pass the class. It’s fairly simple, but it’s also very structured. I graduate in December and, upon realizing my disillusion with academia, I know that grad school, law school, or any continuation of the status quo is out of the question. It’s time to move out.

This entire experience–the realization, the panic, the thrill of uncertainty–has shifted my perspective dramatically, though. I’m not above my peers by stretch of the imagination, but I am coming to understand that the perspective that the realization of the real world lends you is unique. It’s not so much the prospect of supporting yourself that’s daunting. Myself and several of my peers are already paying our way through life. It’s that the breaking down of an old, time-tested structure and its replacement with a new, “adult” structure that is frightening. And insightful.

We’re just kids, by and large. People. Eating, drinking (excessively), fucking, breathing, hating, falling in love, and just living in a desperate effort to find some direction before we’re pushed over that precipice. We’re just trying to figure shit out. And education, we all know in the back of our minds, is not the answer. The answer lies somewhere else and we’re searching frantically for it. For meaning. For understanding. For something, anything, to hang onto.

We’re searching everywhere: in the bottoms of bottles, in the streets of foreign cities, in the arms of beautiful women and men. Nothing is coming up. Our search is fruitless. And then reality begins to set in: that meaning, that dream, that wonderful hope for something bigger than us–it was all just a fanciful illusion, a hope and prayer that got us through those wonderfully blissful structured years. Reality sets in. I need a job. I need money. I need to…subsist. And we subsist.

If you look back up as you’re falling, you realize that the precipice is the same all around and that all the posturing and hoping and dreaming that you were doing was in vain. That those still perched on the edge that think they are in control are ignorant. And in one faltering gesture, you cry up to them any way you can. You know how they–all the old ones–always told us to treasure our youth? Fuck that. It has nothing to do with being young. It has everything to do with being ignorant. Embrace it. Love it. Shy away from the postmodern condition and hang on up there as long as you can. Keep figuring your shit out, for the love of God, for as long as you justifiably can. Because it’s not fun down here. It’s not fun anymore.

Filed under: academics, lamentations by Jesse