For quite a while now, I haven't written anything coming from my own reason and heart. Days and weeks have been spent on fulfilling the needs of material subsistence and economic stability.
Hegel writes in his Philosophy of Spirit that that the passage from Youth to Adulthood consists in renouncing one's ideals and committing to a particular vocation. I think this renunciation is crucial, and the inability to do so testifies to the falsity of the ideal. For example, someone might have the ideal of living in a world where people didn't throw away garbage. Therefore, this person might choose to only buy organic products which are recyclable. However, in doing so, this person disavows the fact that such organic products require non-organic waste in the process of their production. The ideal itself is therefore problematic: it is materially impossible to live without producing garbage.
How, then, does the Young renounce the ideal in order to become an Adult?
All depends on the style of the renunciation. The worst possible case is to revert to a kind of cynical evil. Since my ideal has no effect on how things really are in the world, and since, as a particular being, I cannot but go against my ideal, it is simply pointless to try and do good in the world. Hence, I might as well become an egoist and a hedonist. The problem with this approach is that, although there is a formal shift from good to evil, the basic underlying standpoint of the person stays the same. That is to say, the person is still not reconciled with the world, but maintains an external and formal relation to it by a subjective shift which has no effect on how the world is. Just as the world does not care about the person's good intentions, so is the world indifferent to the same person's malice. A criminal will be thrown into jail, whether he or she willed to do good or evil.
A more rational approach is to think that the world already is, in a way, a realisation of an ideal. Or rather, the true realisation of one's ideal consists in seeing the necessary connection between that ideal and the way the world is. For example, while I cannot but help producing garbage even if I intend to avoid it on a personal level, my very attempt to avoid garbage determines the way in which the garbage is produced. Before, garbage was produced at the level of my individual consumption, whereas now, thanks to my ideal and my effort to realise it, the garbage is produced at the level of production. Although the struggle goes on, my ideal did change the nature of that struggle, not only in my subjective imagination but also in the actual social and material world.
I interpret Hegel's theory of maturity (if I may call it thus) in this latter way. That is to say, the Adult does not simply forget or discard his youthful ideals. Rather, an Adult holds these ideals in suspension in order to step into the struggles which are generated by his or her commitment to precisely the ideals. The Young intends to live in a garbageless world and, upon realising that his noble intentions are not producing the desired results, either stubbornly repeats his or her efforts to live garbage-free, or laments the evils of the world and curses other people, particularly the producers of garbage, for not sharing this ideal. The Adult, on the other hand, goes a step further by trying to enter into the actual struggle. Thus, the Adult steps into the factory in which compostable bags and renewable energy generators are being produced, and contributes to their production. This does not immediately lead to the realisation of the Young's ideal - in fact, it may even appear as a positive hindrance. However, this is due to the Youth's abstract standpoint. The Adult is in fact more rational, because he or she knows that the ideal requires his or her particular commitment to its opposite in order to have an effect on the world.
These considerations can easily be linked to the Morality chapter in the Phenomenology as well as the Morality chapter in the Philosophy of Right.
The upshot of this for my practical interests is this: I must maintain my ideal without despising those (including myself) who seemingly work against the ideal. For example, I subscribe to David Graeber's point that most jobs out there today are "bullshit jobs" - jobs which produce nothing essential to our well-being as human beings. I therefore think that an economic system which forces people to either go into poverty or work their heads off in the bullshit jobs is fundamentally wrong, both from an ethical as well as a more practical perspective. However, on the other hand, this does not mean that I should somehow despise or scourn those who do work in bullshit jobs. On the contrary, I must first reflect on how this ideal - the ideal of living in a society where people are guaranteed the right to survive without being coerced to engage in meaningless competition - informs the way these bullshit jobs actually function. Indeed, this ideal does form a "subterranean" movement within these jobs, and influences the way, say, managers evaluate the performance of their juniors, or what clients and customers expect such companies to deliver.
There might be a few naive and silly consumers who try to take advantage of workers working in bullshit jobs - and these exceptional people are to be taken seriously, for it is they who tend to climb up to positions of power. But this is a topic which requires a separate reflection from a different angle. Moreover, it is thanks to the foregoing that this class of exceptional egoists come into view in the first place.
