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Rewriting the American Dream
Millennials don’t need the same life as their parents.

By Lauren Horsch

 
The American Dream used to be simple — at least that’s what we’ve been told. Supposedly women fantasized of white picket fences and a husband to welcome home with a stiff drink and a meal on the table. They dreamed of fancy kitchenettes, book clubs, a clean home and 2.5 perfect little children. It was a story fit for fairy tales, high school history textbooks and entry-level sociology courses.

But it’s not my story.

And it’s not the story, or the dream, of my generation. We’ve lived through way too much reality to want to set up shop in any sort of fantasy world. Don’t get me wrong, being a Millennial — by definition — isn’t that bad. We have the vast world of the Internet. We have streaming music. Hell, we have the bleak Hellhole known as YouTube. We’ve grown up as digital natives, jumping to get the latest technology as soon as it hits storefronts. We have college degrees, dreams and ambitions. We’ve got hashtags. We have Netflix.

But we’ve also been shaped by catastrophe. We were kids during 9/11. Our families struggled during the Great Recession. Our parents, our siblings and our friends — as well as plenty of us — endured mass layoffs. The War on Terror has been going on the majority of our lives. The NSA has been listening to our conversations almost as long. Because of these things and others, our dreams had to be reassessed.

Today, the American Dream is about finding financial stability without drowning in student loan debt. It’s about fighting our way through this jungle of a job market and coming out the other side with a gig we actually like. It’s about knowing these feelings of doubt and fear about the world outside of our parents’ basements and college dorms will eventually disappear. It’s about survival.

For me, it’s about finding a job that makes me happy, one I don’t dread going to daily. It’s about an apartment I can call home for more than nine months. Most of all, it’s about finding a place to live that offers opportunities for growth. I don’t want to be stuck in a small town working 9-to-5 in a job I hate, unable to do the things I enjoy. It’s about being able to pay back my loans before my hypothetical children are born. For Millennials, this is dreaming big.

We’ve always been told to dream big. From day one, our parents, teachers, politicians and TV shows all told us to dream big. And we listened to Elmo. Oh boy, did we ever. According to a Pew Research Center study, Millennials are the best educated ever. We kick ass at college. But we’re also leaving college with an average of $27,000 in debt. We are getting our asses kicked by debt.

So now the American Dream is getting its ass kicked, too. We have potential. We believe in potential. We yearn to reach our potential. The world still isn’t built to let us. And it isn’t going to be for a long time. The job market is still tight. Internships now take the place of full-time jobs. Relationships are so complicated they need apps. We’re surrounded by digital everything, so we shop on Etsy and brew our own beer. We want to feel authentic. We want to be real.

But we’re struggling. We’re competing. Few of us are actually getting ahead. And when they do, when someone on our Facebook feed hits the resume lottery and gets the dream job at some swanky start-up, we feel mock happy/really crappy Because we were told we could do anything. Because we believe we can do anything. Because we keep dreaming we too can get that proverbial swanky start-up job, that start-up spouse. That swanky, future life.

But all that debt, it’s 27,000 pounds of pressure. It’s going to keep us from buying houses. It’s going to keep us from those picket fences. It’s going to keep us from those fancy kitchenettes and 2.5 perfect kids. I guess it doesn’t really matter, because according to that same Pew study, we’re getting married later — 29 for men, 27 for women, the oldest in modern history.
We’d rather be mobile — literally and figuratively. We move across the country. We strive for adventure. We explore the world. We don’t settle.

What’s that all mean? We don’t get the fairly tale ending. But honestly what if we don’t want it? Personally, I think we’ll be OK. Millennials are writing new fairy tales, ones founded in happiness and realism. We know that we can’t spend frivolously any more; we don’t have the safety nets other generations did. Yet, we’re coming into our own strengths, our own generational markers. Instead of white picket fences and a fancy kitchenette, we’re comfy in our studio apartments and hoping our laptop doesn’t crash mid-Netflix binge. Dream accomplished.

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Photo by Wonderlane

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