Disclaimer: This is not a post about Plato and his cave or the contemporary versions of that allegory found in C. S. Lewis’ works or The Matrix trilogy, so relax. Nor is this about MTV’s long-running reality series.

Having spent the majority of my life in school—I finished the 19th grade in December – I have heard the common refrain that I would soon find out what it would be like in the “real world.” I also heard a lot of talk about the real world when I worked at a Christian summer camp. The real world, as I understood the term, was the one where had the responsibilities of families, bills, etc. In the real world, people are faced with concrete challenges. There is a sense that the real world is where most of the people spend most of their time.

The term the real world has always struck me as odd and condescending. First it is odd for no one has told me the boundaries of the real world. For example, the academy is not the real world presumably because it is a place of theory and research that is not ruled by the capitalistic theories that determine much of our society. That, and fewer people go to college or teach in college than work outside the university. But just because few people work in a setting doesn’t mean that their experience is not as important as others’ work. For example, relatively few people work in investment banking and yet we consider the realm of finance the real world whereas the realm of academics is not.

Second, I find the term condescending because it belittles peoples’ experience. What is it that we experience in our lives that isn’t real? Now everything I experienced in school or camp may not be applicable in the vineyards in Selma, California, but at the same time, not all the skills one gains harvesting raisins is applicable in the classroom. One realm is not categorically more real than the other. The danger as I see it is when we universalize our experience and assume that it is the totality of reality for everyone. My experience and knowledge is reality for me, but when I universalize my experience and deem it exclusively real, I run the risk of invalidating other experiences because they do not fit into my understanding of what is real. I’m not arguing for relativizing ethoses, but describing the fact that there is a plurality of experience.

For us living in the West, how can we say we live in the real world when our wealth is far beyond what the majority of the world experiences (see the Global Rich List to calculate your wealth relative to the rest of the world)? Does the fact that we experience a level of comfort foreign to the majority of the people on the globe mean our experience is less real? Perhaps, but I prefer not to speak about the “real world.” Instead, I prefer the term found in the film Fight Club: “Who you were in Fight Club was not who you were in the rest of the world.” (Emphasis added.)