A few months ago I sat next to a foreigner on an overseas flight. We began talking and after discovering I was a student, he asked what I wanted to do with my degree. I promptly explained my dreams, none of which included owning a big house, a nice car, or climbing the ladder to success. After a moment of silence, he looked at me with both confusion and denial and said flat out, “I don’t believe you.” I was initially shocked by such a frank response, but after some consideration I understood why what I had said was so unbelievable to him. Turns out, he had never met an American who didn’t want to be rich.
The American Dream is "the ideal that every U.S. citizen should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative." Sounds great to me. But why do I feel a pressure to gain titles and add letters to the end of my name in order to be called successful? Who defines success? Does my success correlate with my wealth? Because that’s sure how it feels.
I am about to graduate from a private university with a Bachelors degree and two minors. I have 500+ hours of internship experience, a well-rounded amount of extra-curricular activity and I’ve made the Dean’s List every semester. I’m set up to be successful and I plan to be. But I don’t want to be rich. Yet somewhere, somehow, something has constrained my thinking to this definition of success and has told me that anything less is a waste of potential and a disgrace to the opportunities I’ve been given.
On the flip side, there are stories about people who give up their comfortable lives to help the poor and we applaud them from a distance thinking, “Wow, they must be really good people to deny their own potential to help the less fortunate.” Sure, maybe. Although, that’s the life I hope to live I don’t feel like I’m giving up anything because being rich is not who I am nor what I strive to be. I want to live with the poor and lift them up to be the people they were created to be. I don't want to be their ringleader, masking an inner savior-complex with charity. No. These are people and they have a lot to teach me. They are our future leaders and I will use the opportunities and education I have to empower them. That's my dream.
I should tell you that in no way do I think wealth is a bad thing, I simply question whether or not it should be the goal. At the same time, I am not demanding others to take on my definition of success. My dreams are exactly that, my dreams. James Truslow Adams, who first created the term “American Dream” in 1931, said that it “has not been a dream of merely material plenty… It has been much more than that. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman…unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being…”
Who are you, how were you made, and what do you long for? The American Dream is yours to define.
