A higher education blog about news, humor, advice, and opinion on education, college degrees, university life and careers.

This may have been particular only to my high school career, but from what I’ve seen, I think most kids leave high school with the feeling that they are destined to be amazing and have only to be unleashed on the world and this innate stupendousness will become apparent.

I grew up in a small, one-high-school town where the weekly paper was all of twelve pages and four of those were devoted to the kids in the community. Suffice it to say, it was almost impossible to be a nobody and most of us graduated feeling like awesomely special big fish in a small, safe pond where all adults thought we were wonderful.

You can imagine the shock we felt upon entering college and discovering an ocean of bigger and much more special fish. Leaving our small town and going to college was somewhat hard on our fragile egos, but graduating from college and moving into the real world was crushing, to say the least.

We had erroneously believed that high school was going to be the hardest four years of our lives; the real world, we were dismayed to discover, is harder. My ten-year high school reunion was a roomful of twenty-somethings who were bummed about admitting to everyone that they had not, as it turned out, blossomed into the superheroes we had all assumed was our due. I realize (now, as a far wiser thirty-something) that it would have been impossible for reality to live up to our skewed, hormone-fueled ideal future.

The party picked up once we all took a good look around and realized that not a single one of us was anything more than just plain old normal. Just getting through the week in the real world without caving in is heroic enough. I was a little sad for myself and for the now-adults I’d spent thirteen years of my childhood with—we’d all expected so much more from ourselves and from the world. We were all happy and healthy and were making our ways through the world just fine. But none of us were famous and the learning of crap was still occurring. Reality is one long, drawn-out learning process. It’s so disappointing! When does the learning stop?!

And there you have it: life is hard and is one sucky life-lesson after another. On the upside, almost everyone else on the planet is living some version of The Learning Life that you are. There’s an article in BusinessWeek about recent college grad Max Leiber who takes a temp job and learns about the harsh realities of outsourcing: How I Helped Move a Factory to Mexico. Every job, temporary, super, or otherwise, is a new learning opportunity and it’s interesting to read about Leiber’s experience.

Posted by Alexa Harrington