We Are All Dreamers, Trying to Get Into the Big Club

Screenshot of Image by Osman Rana on Unsplash

Capitalism has taught us that if we want something, we have to fight for it at whatever cost. It taught us about the American Dream — a life-long flourishing of success and prosperity we’ll achieve if we all work hard and play the game right.

At least, that’s the idea.

Now let’s put it into practice in a scenario where we have a broken society and actual human beings.

Your neck is scarred from the leash that strains against your neck, for you are under the stringent custody of your oppressor, running at its beck-and-call. You have shoved success to the edge of your life but you see yourself not as a someone who works instead of thinks, not as someone who has sold themself to two soul-reducing jobs, not as someone whose only purpose in life is to pay bills and taxes on time so you can be considered as an actual adult and to satisfy your woes with short-lived pleasures and material goods.

You see yourself as a temporarily maligned multimillionaire.

You have the work ethic and the smartness and the drive, so now you feel entitled to that elusive successful life. From Goldman Sachs CEOs to business people to head executives at Silicon Valley, you have ambition to become one of them. You may not have a plan or any gumption to ever make your dreams a reality, and you may let your fears and limits smother you into complacency, but you have a dream. And that’s considered enough in this world.

We are all dreamers, trying to get into The Big Club.

“It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.” — George Carlin

You can dream about being in it though. You could be in it too, but you just aren’t there yet.

What George Carlin didn’t say is that the world has created two different versions of The Big Club for two different types of dreamers.

There’s one that’s actually quite small despite its namesake. It’s small for the amount of people in it, for only the too-big-to-fail people — the ones who have gained so much to the point that they are invincible to loss and struggle — can get in. They are the people who swear by society’s two greatest devils — perfectionism and capitalism. Both work hand in hand to convince us that if we were good enough to adhere to their impossibly high standards, we’d be at the top too. We’d suddenly become impermeable to the sticks and stones that had been thrown at us all our lives; we’d stop slaving away to achieve this unrealistic idea of success and instantly make $30,000 a day sitting in our offices Tweeting.

But not without a price.

You are the dreamer, and yet your goal is to become the dream ender. You have been trampled by the top 1%, but you wish to join them in doing the trampling. At the end of the day, you’re dreaming about perpetuating the distopia you dedicated your life to conquering.

I don’t blame you, for you never asked to be put in an economy that encourages that very thing, but you’re not vindicated either.

This Big Club has few members, but it’s gargantuan in terms of wealth. You’ve probably heard of The Million Dollar Break, the opportunity that changes your monotonous life forever, the lucky chance that all the people you idolize took to get to where they are. You’re probably scouring the depths of the earth for it, like Juan Ponce de León and the Fountain of Youth.

Except Ponce de León never searched for the Fountain of Youth; that was just another lie from the history textbooks that they’ll continue to tell us… just like the American Dream.

“It’s alive and well!” the affluent say. Say what you will, but it’s not.

I mean, I don’t understand why everyone feels compelled to tie their hopes and dreams to American culture — it’s the worst thing you can do for yourself. What if your dreams aren’t, I don’t know, “American” enough? Do you just give up on them and aim for something mainstream, something boring and predictable?

The American dream is intransigent. It’s a set of standards you’re supposed to meet in a certain amount of years in a specific way. You’re supposed to transform your Self; you have to become a version of the person you really are that is viewed as “better” and “acceptable” to others.

You’re supposed to have a spike in order to be noticed by anyone who cares. If you’re smart, you must go to college because that’s what everyone else like you does. Otherwise, you’re wasting your opportunity and Gift. You also have to become productive, and in order to so you have to become a morning person, you have to reform your morning routine, and you have change the rest of your life to replicate those of top entrepreneurs.

In order to achieve the American Dream, you have to rewrite your own story to make it look like somebody else’s. In order to become Successful, you copy somebody else’s lifestyle instead of crafting your own strategy.

In order to become the millionaire you’ve been waiting to become, you have to lock yourself up in the local county jail and dress up in the same orange uniform as all your other inmates. You have to stab your Self in the back repeatedly to make sure it’s dead, and that the “New You” is here to stay.

And then you wonder why you’re so miserable.

That Million Dollar Break isn’t going to materialize out of thin air like a pie in the sky once you’ve worked yourself to your breaking point. You don’t need to become a particular person in order to be successful. We idealize these things, as if the suffering only lasts so long before you live the rest of your life in bliss.

Anyway, that’s how the other dreamers see it.

The other Big Club isn’t solely filled with a bunch of millionaires. It’s filled with regular people who are doing a lot of extraordinary things. This club is welcoming and embraces change and irregularity. But not everyone has what it takes to get in and stay in; even though there are thousands of members, they’re all doing things that only a small fraction of the world ever dare to do. And that’s what makes this club so special.

Their work is their dream. Instead of complaining about it like the average person would, they let it shape their character and become apart of them. They reject the pot-of-gold-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel mindset because it makes them adverse to a world in which their work is never done.

Dreams shouldn’t be linked to our own personal success because it’s never been about us. If you work at something you love, you will never have to worry about what comes out for at the other end.

The thing is, it’s never been about hoping for better lives… it’s about hoping for a better world.

We tend to fantasize about the future, as if it is a godsend that will end all our problems. It is nothing but an idea, a figment of our imagination, a concept that isn’t there. But we still put everything off until then, wasting so much time and prolonging our perceived victimhood.

The future doesn’t exist. But if you invest in the now, the aftermath will take care of itself.

After all, there are two big clubs, and we are the ones who decide which one we get into.

Hopes & Dreams

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Bridgette Adu-Wadier

Written by

Student | Graphic Design and Fiction Enthusiast | Amateur Writer | Study Machine

Hopes & Dreams

Dream and Exceed!

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