Dreams Are Fragile
So what do you get out of crushing them?
Once, when I 12, I visited my aunt and uncle at my grandparent's house in North Carolina with my sister, who was about 8 at the time.
One sunny afternoon during the trip, my sister and I were sitting on the porch with my uncle drinking sweet tea as we always did when we went down to the South to visit family. As a 12-year-old with a full-flung sugar addiction, my Grandma’s sweet tea was like liquid crack.
“Samantha, what do you want to be when you grow up?” my Uncle Mark asked my sister. He had that thick Southern drawl that made everything he said seem like it was the beginning of a story in Matthew McConaughey’s memoir, Greenlights.
“A singer.” replied my sister, beaming as she professed her childhood dream. I cringed. I was praying that my uncle wasn’t about to put her down with “real talk”.
“That sounds absolutely wonderful,” he said, “I’m gonna come to all your shows when you’re famous. I hope you’ll leave me a ticket.”
There was silence for a moment. I mean, that’s not really a “what about you?” question when you’re 8 and talking to a man in his 40s.
Nonetheless, my uncle decided to tell us about his childhood dreams, and I’m incredibly glad he did.
“When I was a boy, I wanted to be a cowboy when I grew up.”
“Well,” said my sister, “what are you now that you’re grown up?”
Then, my uncle said something I’ll never forget:
“Well, I’m not a cowboy, so I guess I ain’t grown up yet.”
Nothing Is Like a Childhood Dream
When you’re a young adult, you can’t help but be a little bit self-obsessed. As your childhood innocence wears off, a lot of us cling to our dreams with all our might. We become bitter if we can’t achieve them and selfish if we can. We grow distant from each other.
The future is all anyone asks you about when you’re young. You are the future. You don’t have the life experience to be an authority figure in any subject, and most adults really don’t care enough to ask you what you’ve done. All people care about is what you’re “gonna” do.
But you also are told you “have time”. You’re allowed to try as many things as possible, fail, start over, and be lost — until you’re about 24. Then, it’s time to give up on your “dreams” and grow up. If you don’t, you risk getting Peter Pan Syndrome and becoming part of “what’s wrong with the world today”.
Society is structured around children being the future and adults being the past. I mean, try to seriously imagine a 65-year-old man hustling to become a rapper or a TikToker without laughing. Culturally, there isn’t really an in-between when we talk about the window of opportunity to achieve your dreams. You’ve either peaked at 22, or you need to grow up.
Nonetheless, Western culture teaches us to dream. Every Disney movie and self-help book tells us to achieve our “wildest dreams”, pursue our dreams, and of course, never give up on our dreams.
We’ve been all raised by television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won’t and we’re slowly learning that fact. and we’re very very pissed off.” — Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Though culture tells us to dream, it doesn’t tell us what to do when we realize the painful reality that no one else cares about our dreams nearly as much as we do. For many, this is enough to kill our dreams before they take even flight. So what can we do about it?
Should You Share Your Dreams?
Saying that you have a “dream” is a very vulnerable statement. Once you open up your dream to the world, suddenly there’s the very real possibility that someone — whether it be internet trolls, your parents, or yourself — could stomp on it.
I think that’s part of the reason that Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech was so powerful. It wasn’t just that he was trying to implement social change, it was also the individual vulnerability that made people really moved by his words. Even if you couldn’t relate to being black in America, you could relate to having a dream. We all have dreams.
That vulnerability is also why many people never share their dreams. It seems “logical” to hide your dreams from the world because they appear to have a better chance of survival if you hide them.
The first time I had a dream crushed was when I was about 7 years old. I told my dad that I wanted to be a professional baseball player, and he told me that it was “possible, but not probable” that I would play in the major leagues. It was a small moment and an insignificant conversation, but for some reason, I was devastated. All of the flaws of my baseball dream revealed themselves instantly. One moment I had a dream, the next I had a hobby.
Reality set in.
As a result, I channeled my inner 7-year-old Kurt Cobain and vowed to never share my dreams with anyone ever again. I was 7 and had no idea how the world worked, but I knew that I didn’t want to feel the feeling of “dream death” ever again. I didn’t want to put myself out there because I thought that doing so would make me weak, vulnerable, and an easy target.
I didn’t want to be a part of anyone’s dream death either, so I told myself I’d never crush anyone else’s dreams. I wanted to create a squishy, safe environment where no one’s feelings ever got hurt and no one ever had to lose. I’m still trying to undo that childlike, naive idealism, but that doesn't mean I was wrong about everything.
Dreams alone are weak, and they need to be protected. That’s where you come in.
Your Dreams Are Your Brain Babies
Think about your dream as a newborn baby.
When your dream is born, a million things could go wrong. The dream needs security, nourishment, and love. A bad experience or attack on your young dream could kill it in just an afternoon trip to the batting cages. It could get sick, or worse, it could just be a weak dream that was never meant to come to fruition anyway.
I know that’s a bit of a dark metaphor, but that doesn’t make it wrong. Does that mean that dreams are all doom and gloom? Not a chance. Dreams, like babies, are full of potential.
If you look at a dream and see a weak, brain baby, that’s all you’ll see. If getting rejected from one publisher or having one person tell you they don’t believe in you is enough to squash your dreams, that’s not on the dream, that’s on you. If you have a dream, you have to protect it with the heart that a mother has for her newborn baby. If you don’t care about your dream, it’s going to die. It’s not strong enough to live without you.
Dreams are fragile. The world is dangerous. People are spiteful. Unfortunately, that’s life.
“You got a dream… You gotta protect it. People can’t do somethin’ themselves, they wanna tell you you can’t do it. If you want somethin’, go get it. Period.” — Will Smith, The Pursuit of Happiness
If you need a reason to become stronger, it’s that without doing so, your dreams won’t be strong enough to live inside you. They’ll die or fade into oblivion, and you’ll have no one to blame but yourself and no one to take it out on but the world.
I love Green Day as much as the next white kid from the suburbs, but without love, the Boulevard of Broken Dreams will breed nothing but hate.
Closing Thoughts
At my core, I’m an idealist.
I wish that everyone had the opportunity to pursue and achieve their dreams. I get it, I’m naive and tend to oversimplify life a bit, but that doesn't mean my vision is wrong.
Everyone has a reason to be bitter if they want to. If we want more people to achieve their dreams, more people need to feel free to pursue them, even if their dream is unrealistic. In a world where facts are accessible at the touch of a screen or the push of a button, perhaps the world needs more naive hope.
The point of this article is not that you can do whatever you want or that I should be playing first base for the Cubs right now — though, I wouldn't decline the offer. The point is that your unresolved inner-bullshit affects the people around you, and though you might believe you’re pulling the moral high ground with your realism, you’re just projecting.
If you feel like you’re too small to make the world a better place (chances are, you’re wrong), the very least you can do is to try to not make it worse. How’s that for purpose?