The "American Dream" Is Dying. Don't Get Mad, Get Creative!
Wallow in misery? Or ship out?
“My father used to say ‘son, there’s good and evil in the world. Pick one and get on with it.’”
-Wade Davis
About a year ago, I was sitting in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, sipping from a coconut and subjecting a new friend to one of the political rants I used to love spewing.
A bit of background on this friend:
His parents immigrated to Colorado undocumented when he was five, so he grew up about an hour from me. He was deported at the age of 19 with nothing to his name but has since landed on his feet and owns several small Oaxaca beach hotels.
As a sidebar, he also taught himself to surf on Playa Zicatela.
If you don’t understand what this means, it’s like someone who’s never played basketball asking to play Michael Jordan one-on-one and losing over and over again for years until they can beat him. With the added possibility of death by drowning.
I digress. I was mid-rant, dumping my opinions about how broken the American political system is on a self-made man while sitting in paradise.
Thankfully, my friend cut me off and then hit me with a 1–2 wisdom punch.
“Dude shut the f*ck up.” He said. “Do you know what your f*cking problem is as Americans? You expect s*it to work. And then it doesn’t. And you get all whiney. I went to the same schools as you did, bro. Everybody tells you growing up: ‘we’ve got the best system in the world. We’ve got these founding father motherf*ckers. They sat down and fixed everything’ Well guess what, bro? (he pounded his chest at this point) I’m Mexican. Nobody told me this was all going to work. Nobody told me I came from the best system in the world. They told me ‘it’s all broken, they’re all corrupt, and you’ve got to do what you can to live around that and fight for what’s yours.’ I’m so tired of listening to Americans b*tch about their system man. Do you want to live your life b*tching?”
I was a bit stunned, mostly because this friend is usually a mild-mannered person. Clearly, I had touched a nerve. I apologized, and then we went on talking about waves.
Later that night, I wrote down what he said. What if it’s really that simple? What if the expectation of security is what’s making us miserable?
In my last post, I touched on the fact that I’ve been blown away in my travels by the generosity and joy of many of the displaced people that I’ve met (mainly Venezuelans and Ukrainians).
These are people with no promise of security in their lives, coming from broken systems, not knowing what their future holds, who have found whatever security they can in countries that are often actively hostile to them, and somehow manage to be happy.
Misery and doomsaying have become commonplace in the US lately, especially in my generation and under. There are a million reasons why, but I believe comes down to the fact that we were promised security, and now, security in the form we were promised is not available.
We were told that we’d be able to grow up and buy houses. Now it’s way more difficult.
We were told that we had upward mobility. Now the system is confusing as all hell.
We were told that we had the best system in the world, but we can’t seem to eliminate the corrupt human element.
And yet… We live on. So what do we want to do? Live our lives b*tching? Or get creative and get on with it?
In the last decade, I’ve spent a combined total of four years outside of the country. Every time I go home, I’m blown away by how much low-level, humming anxiety there is stateside.
And yet, when I leave the country and meet my fellow Americans abroad, they tend to be quite happy. Unhinged and a bit crazy, yes, but happy.
These are the opt-outers. The ones who saved enough money to buy land, or learned digital skills, and then got the hell out of Dodge. The Americans who fell in love with other cultures and decided to stay for a while.
It’s never been easier to learn skills online, grab a digital nomad visa, and run for it. Maybe you already have a remote job, and you can jet off to the cheapest place possible with a shiny new VPN tomorrow.
Or teach English in a place that pays well relative to the cost of living. Or work seasonally for six months and jet somewhere sunny and cheap for the other six.
Or get out of your high-cost-of-living city where you have to wait in line for bagels, and buy a homestead in one of those states that pay you to move there. Fill it with goats.
There are a million options. The world is catering to flexibility more and more. You do not have a responsibility to be miserable and stressed.
The world has never been fair. The system has always been rigged. It’s just now that it’s becoming more obvious.
So what are we waiting for? Do you want to spend your life b*tching? Or are you ready to fight to be different? To be more interesting?
It won’t be comfortable, but it will make you more interesting and joyful than you ever imagined.
I love what your friend had to say. As someone who grew up very sheltered and brainwashed over and over again that America was the best and my school system was the best, etc., it's very true. The expectation of relative security crumbling away (especially in regards to education/college) did haunt me for a bit, but I've now accepted it and decided I'm going to go after my dreams even if they're risky, because what do I have to lose?
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