The Difference Between Ideal and Real
Something this last few years has just really struck home with me, and that is the vast gulf between the ideal and real.
When I thought about the ideal before, it was always in the context of Plato, and his "Forms." The recurring example was the ideal "chair" that is the perfect example of "chairness." This is not something that you can envision exactly, and that all the chairs in the manifest world (i.e. here on earth) are at best just shadowy approximations of that ideal.
What no one in Philosophy class ever tells you is that this applies to absolutely everything in your actual life.
Take for instance, Marriage. Marriage is an ideal. It is something that you envision as some perpetual blissful bond between two people, who come together, have some kids, and raise a family that loves each other. And yet, in the real world, we are always riding some tangential approximation of the Ideal Marriage. People don't tell you about the thousand little details of the daily life of a marriage that will impact your reality. They don't tell you about managing feelings, or dividing chores, or household finances, and how sexual tension builds and ebbs and flows, and the recurring conversations that you have to sort out the issues that happen between you.
And Marriage is only just one example.
Career is another one. When you're talking to children you ask them "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And innocently they will say that they want to be a firefighter, or a princess, or a cowboy, or a doctor, or something like that. What no one dares tell a child is that you will ask yourself this same question for the rest of your life. So, you became a doctor. Are you satisfied with just that? Why not become a surgeon? Or the head of a special department? Do you want to explore hospital administration? How ambitious do you really want to be? How far is just far enough to satisfy your childhood dream? If you achieve that dream, will it bring you happiness? Are the days of endless toil meaningful and bring you joy? Did you make a mistake when you went into this career?
My Body is one of the worst. Anyone who reads this knows how much the media will push what they believe should be an ideal body type, and we each construct what is the perfect "me" from this pastiche of unattainable ideals. This leads very young people to dieting. Some people turn to anorexia or bulemia. Some people go through skin bleaching or plastic surgery. All to make themselves more "perfect." They can't believe that there isn't a "perfect body." And they will starve themselves until they become walking corpses in an attempt to achieve the unachievable.
Don't get me started on "The American Dream."
I think that dreams and aspirations are very important to us as people. They give us hope and they help us think beyond our day to day lives. They give us that light to strive toward. But I think that when we get confronted with the dissonance between the Ideal and the Real that a lot of us turn to despair. Our marriage wasn't good enough. My job wasn't perfect. This body I live in could be just that much better. My life isn't everything I hoped it would be. All of this tears us apart for not living up to the perfection of something that could never be in the first place. It's all just Santa Clause or the Boogeyman.
There is no ideal marriage.
There is no ideal job.
There is no ideal body.
There is no ideal life.
These things exist in a world that is messy, complicated, screwed up, and in a constant state of flux.
And that's okay.
Because that's REAL.
Everyone has to figure out how to make these things work best for themselves and their circumstances. No one person has all the answers to figuring this shit out. We're all just making it up as we go along. Some people have open marriages and some people have serial monogamy. Some people go through jobs like they change their clothes, and some people will work in the same assembly line for their whole life. Some people continue to push themselves at gyms to train for decathlons and some people just don't give a fuck and just do whatever.
Each of us finds our own way. It's not right. It's not wrong. It just IS. And we need to accept what IS, instead of despairing over what isn't.