Is This The Real Life?

(Or is this just fantasy?)

I attended a very small Catholic college, with student life policies that were—to be fair, more lenient than some other small Catholic college—but still somewhat restrictive. Almost without exception, when someone (student or local or someone’s family member) wanted to criticize the student life policies, or complain about the small-community social dynamics and drama, they would say dismissively, “just wait until you get into the REAL world” or “but this isn’t REAL life.”

More recently, I’ve seen this criticism made of online activities, where people say they are quitting Facebook or stepping back from an online community because “I need to pay more attention to real life.“

I’ve even caught myself doing it, from an entirely different angle, looking at the aspirations and obsessions of people living in a small circle of work-drink-crash-work, with all of the social inwardness and drama that comes with that lifestyle, and thinking, “but, that stuff isn’t real. Not like raising children or getting involved in things that really enrich the larger community and future generations. That life looks so small.” The amazing thing is that I can drift into this way of thinking even though I am self-consciously aware that my life, orbiting as it does around my three children, my work, and my online interests, is liable to raise the same criticism: it looks so small, so insular. The world I live in isn’t the real world.

But it is. All of it. In the home, in the workplace, online, with my family, in a small college or on the street…it’s all real. You have a real capacity to do good, and a real capacity to do evil. You can work on your self, and work to build up the people around you…or you can be self-destructive and harmful to others. Your actions and words have meaning, whether you are on Facebook or a streetcar. They have moral impact, on you and on others, even if you can’t see it, even if the scope seems small.

It’s all real life.

Image via https://www.flickr.com/photos/krystiano/5537092373/ [modified]