Welcome to the real world. No thanks! Keep your welcome and shove it. I rather suffer in anguish and misery for the pursuit of my dreams and artistic expression. So goes the battle cry of youth whose insistent pursuit of their dreams is uncrushable; until met with evangelist of ‘the real world.’
Youth will do anything to pursue their dreams and their passion. Youth will concoct in their mind ideals of what their purposed journey should be like, but when the pursuit of these dreams do not lead to the desired outcome this creates an ‘angst.’ This angst, an unspecified feeling of anxiety about the world and your personal freedom, is what forms the topic of J. M. Coetzee novel Youth.
John, the narrator in Youth, has an unrelenting desire to be a writer, but his ideals of what a writer should be keep him trapped. “He is not a good enough lover, not fiery enough, not passionate.” According to John, writers should be; passionate, seductive, fiery, and unhindered. However, John is cold, distant, has trouble connecting with women, and finds it difficult to write. His own mother he claims is “distressed by his coldness.”
Furthermore, John is caught in a choke hold by the ‘real world’ in which he has to make a living by taking a programming job at IBM. However, the job at IBM is killing his creative pursuits and making him even more cold and distant:
“IBM, he can swear, is killing him, turning him into a zombie.”
“Should he soldier on until closing time, though he is racked with yawns?”
“He will sit in a corner, tight and hunched…waiting for his season in hell to pass.”
“He cannot go on like this. He cannot sacrifice any more of his life to the principle that human beings should have to labour in misery for their bread.”
The lights are beginning to dim and John’s passion is diminishing. The youthful yearning he once had is being crushed by his unrealized dream and the trappings of his cubicle at work. Somehow this diminishing passion John correlates with growing up.
Sound familiar? The advent of crushing dreams and the diminished pursuit of your life’s work or passion is branded as entrance into the ‘real world;’ the official ushering into adulthood and the zone of becoming comfortable with mediocrity.
John struggled with this:
“He has stopped yearning…Does it mean he is growing up? Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?”
What about fear and failure, the gripping fear that is paralyzing, the kind that turns unsupported ideals into self-fulfilling prophecies, or the fear of failure that usurps perfectionism and unreachable expectations.
John later recognized that he needed to embrace his fear of failure and not allow his youthful yearning and dreams to die;
“What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail and fail again?’
And yet for him it is a question, he is uncertain about whether this is the answer to his ‘angst’ or whether he will make that move. He does recognize that if he continues in the direction that he is pursuing, he will be “playing himself, with each move, further into a corner and into defeat.”
For more depth see Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II
