Five years in the real world

Ah, the real world. All those words of warning and nuggets of wisdom from high school teachers, college counselors, professors, parents, and politicians who tried to heed our generation of the coming dangers that we as young adults will face in an ever-changing world as we enter the workforce. Well, after about five years of experiencing the “real world” for what it is, I think I have a fairly good and rapidly increasing grasp of what it’s really all about and where it’s going.

For starters, one of the first things I quickly learned within a few months of moving off to a different state and living by myself is that everything is broken. Everything. Organizations, agencies, consultants, and pretty much entire industries fall prey to a shocking level of departmental inefficiencies, communication breakdowns, and the institutional inertia to resist any type of change. I was amazed at how much back-and-forth it took to get something simple done like a title transfer for my car. Or trying to prove rental history. Or heck, even registering to vote. Governments at every stage — city, stage, and federal — suffer particularly harshly from this.

Ultimately, if you see a company functioning at some level without seeming like it’s breaking down at every point of contact with the consumer, it means that they’ve got some strong people. Yes, people. Senior management at organizations is rarely known for innovating and pushing breakthrough methods of delivering a product or service. It all usually stems from a passionate group of people or a highly-driven and motivated individual with a firm goal in mind. These are the people who go way out of their typical job description to get things to happen and push management to take some riskier decisions that ends up not only improving their core business goals, but also delivers a more efficient and seamless experience to the consumer. I’ve noticed this at all the places I’ve worked at and I’m convinced that the entire workforce functions like this.

As a child, I always assumed that adults would “schedule a meeting” to discuss something important and then put the thing through a well-established process to determine the next steps and the best course of action. Turns out everything is screwed up. There is usually no process. People just kind of casually move initiatives around an organization depending on which ones pique their interest and which ones don’t. So much comes down to a manager’s (or CEOs) personality and desires to get certain things done that the rest of the usually more critical initiatives are left to die, such as reworking the core architecture of their cybersecurity platform or strengthening cross-departmental efforts so that they share the same performance metrics.

As a follow-up to the “everything is broken” point, I’ve also learned that nothing will happen unless I actively work to ensure that it does. This goes for simple things like hospitals sending you a voicemail saying your appointment is confirmed (but it really isn’t), your internet provider consistently overcharging you month-per-month (unless you actively stop them from doing this), and mass advertising creeping into every facet of your life until you don’t know whether the thing you’re looking at is an ad or not. I have to regularly keep the hospital staff in check to make sure they’ve actually got me scheduled, I have to keep bugging my ISP about surcharge fees that they passed on to me for their own outage, and I have to actively avoid advertising everywhere so as to not have my data tracked.

Again, when you’re younger, you’ve got this rose-colored glasses outlook on adulthood. You think it’s this glorious, highly-efficient, and well-managed system of professional, respected, and well-adjusted human beings firing on all cylinders. But you soon come to realize that most of them are simply trying to get by until the next day, living one-day-at-a-time, and just trying to provide for their families. There is no core ulterior motive for most of them aside from simply existing. And that depresses me. You can see it in their eyes. No ambition. Just mediocre contentment with the state of their life and their understanding of the world. The shattering of this illusion is what forces a change in a lot of young adults — to either be that one person who will soar above and beyond the disenchanted masses to be something more, or be normalized by intense socio-economic pressure to conform into the same cycle of rote adulthood that the rest of them are stuck in, making the same mechanical motions day in and day out until the mid-life crisis strikes.

On a less-existential note, another learning in my first forays into the real world involves empathy, or more specifically, the lack of it. It’s a well-known fact that it’s much easier for human beings to empathize with “their own kind” than others. They will help out the ones they relate with and blissfully ignore the ones to whom they don’t. And we’ve taken note through most of human history. The British Raj sent Sikh soldiers to annex the lands of Southern India into their control because they knew it would be difficult for Sikh soldiers to empathize with the southern people. A more recent example, the Spanish government sent Spanish soldiers to block the Catalan referendum vote because they knew the Catalan police would empathize with their own people if they had them do it.

In design, we’re constantly taught to look at every single thing through an empathetic lens. What would it feel like to use this product as a person of color? How would a paraplegic person operate this machine? How can we make it easier for non-English speakers to properly comprehend this system? By nature, designers are applying empathetic problem-solving techniques to ask inquisitive questions and design the right solution. It’s easy to get consumed in this bubble and assume that everyone’s brains work this way. People in tech get it, so everyone must, right? Couldn’t be farther from the truth. A mind-bogglingly large majority of people either simply don’t care or aren’t willing to invest the mental energy required to even try or care.

In a world so heavily globalized by tightly-interlinked trade and commerce that’s slowly being cannibalized by an unprecedentedly rapid adoption of digital technologies, we have more access to information and knowledge than we’ve ever had. We know what’s happening in the farthest corner of the world within seconds of it happening. You would think this kind of interconnected global community would be inclined to be more empathetic towards each other. Unfortunately, our political climate says otherwise. I’ve never lived in a country so divided amongst its own citizens than the one that exists under the Trump administration. Basic humanitarian rights somehow become bipartisan issues with one tweet, hate groups continuing not only to operate but also thrive in larger numbers than ever before is somehow acceptable, old white men making decisions about womens’ reproductive rights get shrugged under the rug as no big deal, the response to domestic terrorism and demand for gun control legislation (along with better mental health treatment options) is non-existent, solid scientific data about the accelerating pace of climate change straight up gets thrown in the trash in favor of better short-term profits for oil & gas conglomerates, and false propaganda runs amok filling people with a distorted perception of what the real threats in today’s society are. If these aren’t the signs of the exact opposite of a more empathetic world, I’m not sure what is. Empathy seems like the one solution to a lot of the world’s problems, but I don’t really see signs of it anywhere these days.

Maybe it was a strange time to enter the real world. Maybe my generation, growing up with the internet where everything was fast and instantly accessible, was so spoiled by the habitual feedback of instant gratification that we’re sick and tired of inefficiencies and slowness everywhere. Maybe growing up in so many different cities, states, and even continents has given me a very different worldview than the one a typical suburban American kid gets, which in turn greatly warps my expectations of society and reality.

But for all my complaints, there are many exciting things happening. Never before has the world seen so many startups spring up to solve some of the most pressing problems in the world. Not since the Space Race have I seen such a renewed interest in space exploration and colonization of extraterrestrial planets. Never before have the lower classes in developing countries had such vast access to education and healthcare. Technologies like the smartphone, solar power, breakthroughs in medical research and genetic engineering are paving the way for what will surely be a radically different world in 50 years or so. And it’s going to be our generation that does it. The generation that was told repeatedly by the generation that raised them that it was going to be tough out there. That we’ll have to “fit in” and not rock the boat too much. That expectations will be high and we will be held accountable for our actions. Well, given the way things are going, I think our generation is poised to be one of the most successful in history. We’re a lot more accepting, tolerant, empathetic, and grounded in reality than most of the Baby Boomers are. We deal in facts and not in beliefs. We speak up when things don’t seem right and take action using the tools we’re familiar with (the internet) to force the notion of change.

This is what gives me hope for “the real world”. We may have inherited a broken workforce stuck in the Industrial Revolution era of operational management. We may have entered a world where most of the things haven’t been digitized yet. We most certainly are under the whim of a lot of old-school traditionalist schools of thought when it comes to getting the people in power to push through a revolutionary change. But one thing is for sure — as we continue to insert ourselves into the process and strive towards a more efficient future, we’ll end up permanently leaving our mark on the things to come. Until of course, a 25-yr old in 2065 puts up a blog post echoing the tone and sentiment of this one complaining about how slow the interstellar travel speeds are and why the previous generation sucked at properly planning the AI integration into the workforce and all the inefficiencies it’s causing.