Recently I was tapping through snippets of video on Instagram known as stories. People that you follow can capture a picture or several seconds of video then add filters, text, and small graphics on top of the video. Among the pictures of picturesque meals in dimly lit restaurants are snapshots of the mundane—the weather, traffic, a new television show—and whatever else that you decide makes up your social media identity. It is practically a requirement that one has a social media presence now. An old friend posted a point of view video of her walking through the airport and added the text “back to reality” on top of the frames. I have heard and seen that term used with lament in the past, and especially among my peers who are nearly finished filtering from college into career.
Most people use their work or career as a major reference point for the definition of “reality.” That is to say, a major reference point for their life and its foundations. However, while anecdotal, I’ve heard generations before mine use that term in its frustrated tone much less than my newly professional peers. Social reality has always differed between generations in ways that divide the young and middle-aged, and the critical differences of occupational and outlay reality between generations at this moment are disruptive—gig economy and contractual work, skyrocketing cost of living, tuition expenses that remain burdensome for years. But, where does the reality that we millennials carry, end, and become the mutually agreed upon existence that the majority of the population can see? In this socio-political climate, there is certainly reason to believe that the increasingly oscillating definition of the objective is losing meaning.
When someone comes back from a two-month long backpacking trip in Europe, as many of my generation do, shooting a Snapchat of them waiting in line at the grocery, or filling out paperwork for a lease, or sitting in traffic, or on the plane ride home from wherever, with the words “back to reality” slithering on top of the image, what is often meant is the return to the domain of responsibility. Responsibility isn’t necessarily a negative thing—it demands principles, some level of conscientiousness, and a genuine care for one’s future—but the antonym of being responsible is being carefree. And while long-term backpacking trips may not be exceptionally carefree and more experiential, vacation as a period of spending for experience and joy is supposedly carefree. This dichotomy places excursions and digressions from occupational life as divorced from “reality” where responsibility resides. If work is reality, then vacation is fantasy and therefore holds no causal relationship to the truth of occupational existence. Perhaps we learn nothing from our vacations, because all we can really hope for is to gasp a breath of fresh air.
The primary lament of young adults, the ones that excoriate statism and rattle in their laborious cages, is that this home-bodied life is not fulfilling, inconsequential, and rudderless despite its claim to direction. The question is the distinction of work-life balance and how it defines one’s identity—to compartmentalize work as just a means or to merge it with your conception of self. Yet, despite the fluidity of identity and turn to experiential travel, work life retains the rooted definition of “reality.” It seems more to be a euphemistic compromise for the paradise lost that is the transition from collegiate levity to bill-paying adulthood.
This barrier reminds me of the code-switch that fellow international students and I noticed among Japanese friends and employees while living in Japan. The Japanese language contains a mode of speech known as keigo, or honorific speech, which is universally used in a conversation where there is a disparity in social position between speakers and the disparity necessitates politeness beyond the difference in age of friends. Age and seniority in the workplace are common divisions, but the most common is between customer and employee. Keigo is not simply speaking with more grace, but encompasses longer phrases than casual speech and specific verb and noun forms to address a customer’s actions and preference. The effect, in our observation, was that two distinct personalities appeared at different times—one’s work persona that spoke with severe politeness, and one’s normal self, living with truncated casual speech. Certainly the same exists in Western societies, but the severity in the linguistic change separates the Japanese example from others. It is an insurmountable barrier for the benefit of the company. For the “work-life-realitarians” of Western society this demarcation is similar in its separation between private and occupational persona by way of the declaration that work is reality and vacation mere chicanery
Indeed, why does this barrier exist between labor and freedom and is it surmountable? Historical understandings of leisure presume a distinction between pre-industrial and industrial western civilization, where leisure as we understand it did not exist before modernization. The dichotomy is both useful and obfuscating for placing modernization as a key factor and unfortunately the single factor. However, these trends changed slowly and not with the erection of the first smokestack, like Peter Burke writes, “as work became less playful and working hours were more sharply defined, there was more need for the non-utilitarian activities we have come to call ‘leisure’.” Therein appears the seed of distinguishing reality and work from unreality and leisure, because, prior to the shift, there was likely a more singular conception of reality as it related to labor and the nonexistent idea of leisure.
The distress of work as life and vacation as imagination likely has risen out of previous generations’ conceptions’ of labor, given to the idea that “happiness is to have as little gap as possible between your work and play,” according to Paul Krassner, a counterculture writer of the 1960s. He considered himself one of the lucky ones who had merged the personal and professional. We still agree with Krassner on the luck of rendering work and leisure the singular. Those who love their work and live in service of it often describe themselves in enlightened terms, at peace with some part of themselves, not working to live, but living to work as they say. If he is lucky, the rest are typical and suffer from the common delineation between tormented work and blissful redoubt of free time.
Imagine the woman who lives to work, who turns herself inside out to complete her tasks with poise and violent ambition, who turns the distending barrier away in favor of unifying the selves of work and pleasure. When she returns home—if she does—does she find her homebody waiting at the door, or is the mentality of labor so tightly leeched on that she cannot escape the unified self, that there is no compartmentalization of priority? Goals of profession are simply goals of existence. Is the modern unified self, flanked by email, cell phone, and the impossibility of disconnection—inescapable “reality”—so desirable?
Contrary to the employed worker, there are many hundreds, thousands of men and women who make their living upon the web, finding insatiably beautiful pictures for a tap and click rather than a punched time card. They ramble about games, music, cooking; their travel photos wind up on listicles that permeate the sub-news web. Behind their picturesque life (if they use Instagram) or methodically scraped-together video (if they clutter YouTube), is the rudderless work of finding the next scoop, shot, or view-busting topic. This work almost always embeds advertising, and requires the negotiating of contracts and partnerships to feed products to one’s audience. Is this the unattainably magnificent mending of the unified self and the compulsion to freedom that we imagined it as? Is working for yourself under the gun of advertisement what we’re really after? It is the modern expression of the live to work archetype. Is choice what we are really after?
There can be no clear conclusion in favor of living one way or the other, because if we depart from “reality” then we must be endowed with riches; if we chart our own path via self-employment, our lives are marred with precariousness and unpredictability; if we devote ourselves to an established position, we stagger ourselves between “reality” and whatever unreality is. The grass is greener and objects in mirror may appear fonder than they are.
Despite the complexity of a whole generation made of those who both demand greater freedom and those who accept it, of those who create and those who reiterate, of those willing to mend work and leisure and those content to compartmentalize, on the whole, millennials are less willing to accept labor as reality whether by rejecting traditional work forms altogether and placing faith in the sale of travel, or demanding more flexibility and perks from their workplaces. And why not given the sticky nature of student loans, disproportionate cost of living to wages, and worker security? If young workers are not attempting to destroy the barrier between life and work (where email is pervasive), reality and fantasy, then they are certainly hoping to extract more from employers. A unified self for most workers is unlikely—some things must be done by humans…until we can give robots those dirty tasks.
However, whatever we choose for ourselves, I think the barrier between reality and unreality is a useless and limiting distinction. Its only purpose is to propel us into a daze of bliss that we voluntarily disconnect from the weighty meaning of responsibility. Every moment spent awake is a lived moment and is a simple complement to everything else. Whether it was spent in the Alps, nursing a flu, or under fluorescent lighting, the experience is unbearable in its existence and must be acknowledged. The limitations of a “vacation” influencing our “reality” may exist because of our borrowed ideas of work-life balance and the mythic “lucky one,” but it should not, whether we labor in monolithic office spaces or at a sordid home desk space.