Critiquing the American Dream
Las Vegas, Nevada
Any time that you try to generalize and homogenize a radically diverse group of people, you'll completely and utterly fail in your characterization. It would usually be better to not even attempt to generalize across a broad population, yet in certain situations, it seems like generalizations have to be made.
So often, journalists and politicians make just such false generalizations with their talk about the "American Dream." It seems like they have to make these unfortunate generalizations because they're in the process of serving the broad and diverse citizenry of the nation. Yet as we analyze this generalized “American Dream,” it begins to break down.
So what exactly is this "American Dream" that they speak of? What is the generalization being made?
As far as I've been able to determine from observing the world around me and reading extensively, the ideal American Dream looks something like this:
Graduate from high school, and jump straight into college in the hopes of getting a high-paying job afterward.
Enjoy the "college experience" by partying your ass off, not working, and not really learning anything because you were too hungover to do more than sit in the back of the classroom and copy off your friend's notes.
Score the degree you were looking for to get the supposedly high-paying job, but along with it, you'll have been gifted a mountain of debt because you spent the past four years partying your ass off and not earning a cent.
Hopefully, you'll get a well-paid job that provides you the opportunity to "climb the corporate ladder," and level up both your income and the power that you exert over other people. Forget the simple things that you might truly enjoy in life, like camping in the woods—you need to make sure that your job can provide the salary needed to pay off that small mountain of debt you accrued through your four years of enjoying the "college experience."
Now that you're finally earning some money, it's time to replace the beater car you inherited from your parents with a fancy-fangled Tesla. Hey, it's good for the environment! But since you didn't work a damn minute of your four-year college career, better get some 0% financing to start that car loan off right.
Right about the time you begin to climb the corporate ladder, you meet someone that you think you'd like to fuck for the next 60 years or so. Naturally, you two decide to get married and spend your life together.
Along the way to marriage, you get a dog to see if you can handle having kids.
Before you get married, you need to have a "stable" place to live that's a "good investment." So, the young couple decides to buy a house, never minding that they already have twin mountains of debt from 4 years of getting wasted in an expensive adult daycare. Thankfully, the young couple has started climbing said corporate ladder, and the banks are willing to give them an even more substantial mountain of debt to buy a tiny box that we call a "house."
Now that the young couple has acquired the stereotypical white picket fence, they finally get around to the getting married part. Since they've spent all their money on the house and are still paying for a couple of Teslas, they have to finance the typical $20,000 wedding as well. What's a few more grand piled on top of the existing mountain of debt they've already acquired?
After borrowing money to go on an exotic honeymoon, the young couple settles into the house with their dog. But after a year or so, they find themselves bored. Their cubicle jobs and the suburban disconnection from nature are slowly destroying their souls, but they need those small advancements every few years to keep chipping away at that mountain of debt... or at least appear to chip away at it, because somehow it just keeps getting bigger as the interest piles up.
To escape the boredom, the young couple decides they should start reproducing. Out pop a few mini-mes, and suddenly the young couple has found their purpose and calling in life! Nothing, I repeat NOTHING, is as important as rearing those children to be god-fearing young clones. Let’s ignore the fact that you've evolved over the course of millions of years to reproduce your genetic code effectively. Making copies of your genes is literally one of the only skills that evolution has outfitted you for—don't be too surprised that you can hack it at parenthood. While it might be your life's calling, it's by no means unique or special.
Around about this point in the American Dream, there tends to be a fork in the road. The path has a high probability of splitting here, as it turns out that reproducing your genetic code isn't all that interesting of a project after all. The split could be due to a "mid-life crisis", a divorce, or some other unexpected pothole in the road of life. But I'm relating the best-case American Dream scenario here, so let's assume (a massive, likely-false assumption) that the young couple swerves around the mid-life crisis and keeps moving forward uninterrupted.
Even though the now-middle-aged couple has dodged a potential car wreck, they've suddenly come face-to-face with their mortality and realized that they might need to start planning for what will happen when they can no longer work. They've just hit 40, so they decide to get down to work on saving for something called "retirement." Unfortunately, they don't have too much money to allocate to this goal. The student debt, car payments, and mortgage are still sticking around draining their funds, and for some reason, they didn't manage to climb quite as far up the corporate ladder as they had dreamed during college graduation. Somehow they got stuck languishing somewhere in the middle, but nobody's quite sure how.
At this point, both parties in the middle-aged couple abso-fucking-lutely hate their jobs, but they can't leave them because they still need to pay down their debt and cover their bills, and now, because they waited until the age of 40 to begin investing, they're going to have to really hit it hard for the next few decades to have any hope of putting food on the table when they are physically or mentally incapable of working anymore.
This grind is repeated for the next 30 years or so. Since our now aging American Couple continues to buy newer and better Teslas, and even newer and better houses (what happened to that "stability" you were looking for?), they quickly find themselves approaching 70. Even though they're not sure they have quite enough money, they decide to finally retire.
Now this, THIS is the goal they've been working toward for the last 50 years! Now, they can finally relax, sit by the poolside and drink Mai Tais, hit white balls with sticks through a big field, and simply do... nothing. Ah, this is the dream, isn't it? This is what it’s all about, the past 50 years of slaving away in a soul-sucking job has finally gotten the American dreamers to heaven on earth.
They've done it—they've achieved the American Dream. Unfortunately, after a couple of years of nothingness on a golf course, their pleasurable “golden years” get consumed by mounting medical issues, as they've largely ignored their health for the past ~50 years of cubicle-sitting. The now-elderly couple spends the last 5 or so years in and out of hospitals before succumbing to the inevitable at the average age of 78.
The American Dream, people. All we want our politicians to do is to give us a chance to pursue the American Dream!
What the Generalizations Miss
But what these political generalizations miss are the millions of people who have closely watched others around them pursue the American Dream and then realized that at the end of the road, those cogs in the system have nothing to show for it. The attentive millions decide for themselves, "hmm, that doesn't look like a dream worth pursuing to me. Fuck that—I think I'm going to live my life differently."
We call most of those attentive millions "millennials."
Even though the talking heads continue to overgeneralize our population and our generation, there's a groundswell happening right now, as we speak, that's threatening to overwhelm the status quo of the American Dream. If you haven't yet, it's worth perking up your ears and taking notice.
