When idealism meets reality

For most people at some point the idealism of youth meets the full reality of adulthood and responsibilities.

And often this is a complete bloodbath for people (metaphorically or suicidally) depending upon the person.

I tended to be as idealistic as the next person mostly because I had been told "I could be anything and do anything with my life from birth".

Though on one level that was true, it was true only because I was an American who was well educated and White in the 1950s and I had well adjusted intelligent functional parents who were not people who drank or smoked because they were mystical Christian Ministers who ran their own church in Los Angeles from my ages 6 to 12 years of age.

So, this idealism was both very good and very bad in many different ways growing up.

Idealism is good because you have ideals and likely have ethics too and life actually means something to you and you might even treat people better than the average person does too.

But, it is bad in that idealism is NOT reality, it's only a hypothetical reality which may or may not exist now or ever in the real physical world anywhere on earth.

But, often as a younger person you don't know that.

So, when our idealism hits reality it bloodies us all.


So, at this point in life I wouldn't call myself any longer an idealist by any stretch of the imagination.

Survival, raising a family, running businesses to support my family has turned me into a Compassionate Pragmatist is what I would tend to call myself now after growing up in the 1950s, coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s and raising my family since 1974 and now I'm a Grandfather.