Giving Up The Dream…

This week’s post is a really important one.  It’s also a difficult one for me to write, and might hit close to home for a lot of people.  So, fair warning.

When we grow up, we’re surrounded by images of what a friend of mine recently referred to as The Dream—an image of the way our lives are quote-unquote “supposed to” look like.

The exact specifications of The Dream will no doubt look different to everyone, but it usually goes something like this:

 

What is The Dream?

In the way of life I’m calling The Dream, the person has a stable, full-time job they can consistently work without fear of being laid off or having to change jobs.  Said job pays a salary that’s not only enough to live on, but enough to save for retirement and afford amenities of decent quality, including furniture, vacations, late-model cars, and consumer electronics.  The salary from said job also allows the person to buy a house that’s relatively new, relatively large, and has some amount of property (most often in the form of a backyard, but often expressed in terms of acres of land).

A natural component of The Dream is some form of monogamous relationship with a significant other, most often through marriage. The wedding that commences said marriage may or may not be large, but it will be memorable, include custom decor and large amounts of planning, and be comparable to weddings held by the person’s friends and family.  The wedding will naturally be expensive, but the couple will pay for it themselves using money they’ve saved at their stable jobs (or possibly through a wedding loan).

The new couple will live happily, with minimal fighting or disturbances, enjoying their life together and having anywhere from 0 to 3 children, forming a nuclear family unit where they live in their house without roommates or other relatives (such as grandparents, siblings, or in-laws).

Once the specifics of The Dream have been achieved by the couple, an enormous amount of pressure will be released off their shoulders because they’ve achieved what they’ve spent the last several decades directly and indirectly pursuing.  In particular, money will no longer be a worry for them, or at least in the sense that lack of money stops them from feeling secure.

The couple will no longer feel compelled to pursue new avenues of growth or change because they’ve found their “Happily every after” of the fairy tales.  Instead, having achieved The Dream at last, they can devote more time to their jobs, raising their children (if they have them), maintaining their hobbies, and enjoying their free time, confident in the lives they’ve carved out for themselves that they started going after when they were young.

The Dream is rarely talked about in terms as direct as the ones I’ve laid out here, but we come to understand it through our parents, older generations, and our peers.  These people might show off (or even directly brag about) the gains and rewards of their own Dream, which can lead to a phenomenon known as Keeping Up with the Joneses.

I’ve recounted all of this in an exaggeratedly distanced tone, but this issue is worth thinking about: How much of this version of The Dream applies to you?

 

Pursuing a Creative Life Can Often Derail The Dream

Notice that I began my description of The Dream with the notion of a stable job, which brings with it a consistent income and stops you from having to worry about money.  For many, this is a cornerstone of The Dream upon which everything else I’ve mentioned (house, marriage, retirement, etc.) rests.  After I finished college, everyone was talking about getting these types of jobs in the years after I finished college, where they were often referred to as “real jobs” (as if other kinds of jobs weren’t “real”) and you could be considered a failure if you didn’t have one.

If you’re a creative person, having a stable job can bring in money you can use later to pursue your creative pursuits more easily, but sometimes having the kind of “real job” that people imagine as part of The Dream can be a distraction from your creative goals, and even prevent you from reaching them.

In short, the creative path and the stable jobs that make up The Dream aren’t always compatible.

This can be a really hard thing for people to acknowledge.  You might cling to the belief that you can have the creative life you want along with everything you imagined as part of The Dream in one perfect life.  Some people, of course, can have both, but the vast majority of people can’t—or, at least, can’t have both right away.

One common path I see a lot of creative people go down is trying too hard to have both The Dream and a creative career at the same time.  When they try this, because most aspects of The Dream are easier to get and more highly valued by society than creative careers, they’re the ones that take priority, leaving the person’s creative career to slip by the wayside.

And that’s not a mistake I want to see other creative people making.

 

Giving Up the Dream Can Be Hard

Creative people can face a LOT of social pressure to pursue the components of The Dream.  You might feel pressured by parents, older generations, or peers (the same people who taught you about The Dream in the first place!) to find a “real job,” buy a house, get married, or have kids, before starting your creative path, or maybe even instead of your creative path.

By not doing some or all of these things, in these people’s eyes you might be construed as a Failure, and no one wants that.

And because no one wants to be seen as a Failure, they might start going after more components of The Dream rather than pursuing the creative path they care most passionately about.

But moreso than criticism from the outside, the most dangerous criticism can come from within us. We might want the components of The Dream ourselves, and worry that we might never get them.  Or, even if the people in our lives actually understand and support our creative goals, maybe we worry too much about what they’ll think if we don’t have all the components of The Dream to show off in our own lives.

These kinds of thoughts come from within, and might drive us to set our creative goals on the backburner so we can pursue The Dream rather than doing what we really want to do.  This mindset can be the most dangerous of all, but if you’re really serious about your creative goals, you’ll have to set your own priorities.

And maybe, when you sit down and really, really think about this issue, the answer you’ll find is that The Dream is really more important to you than having a creative career, so you want to aim for that first.  That’s OK, and almost certainly the right decision for you if you believe it is.

It’s your life, after all!

 

Final Thoughts

As I’ve said before, there’s no Google Maps for the creative life, and the path that works for one person might not work for others.  The same goes for priorities—The Dream might be your priority, it might be great if you can get it, or it might not be what you want at all.

We all have to make our own decisions when deciding our values and how we pursue them, and no one should ever make you feel bad for pursuing one path over another.  In the grand scheme, it’s not good for society to prioritize The Dream over other kinds of paths, and when people become more understanding of these different paths and the advantages to pursuing them, all of us can live freer, more fulfilled lives.