Comment by hnthrow90348765 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnthrow90348765 | Hacker News Reader

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hnthrow90348765

>These huge cost increases for healthcare, education, and housing are not compatible with the American Dream.

Yep, it's dead. Someone please make it official already. Don't worry about the autopsy or time/date of death - just get the death certificate already and let's move on.

Whether they want to replace it with something equivalent is frankly up to the rich people, college institutions, and home owners/sellers. Just guessing based on the trend, but that will also be a No.

Right now, it's really called "The American Survival Games". This isn't just fear mongering, you have to change your mindset. The American Dream meant you were assured some level of survival in exchange for work. Now that is not the case and you constantly have to reassess what your work trajectory is going to get you and if it will be enough to survive the next day, but also survive the volatility of a very polarized nation changing its policies on a whim. You also need a backup plan for your job in case you just get laid off due to no fault of your own. And a backup plan for the backup plan because the hiring landscape might change.

> "The American Dream meant you were assured some level of survival in exchange for work."

I've never thought that was a common interpretation of the American Dream.

I've never thought it was anything but that. Work hard and be rewarded, that's the American Dream.

The distinction that ericjmorey is making (I believe) is that the reward is not guaranteed, only the opportunity.

That's close to what I have gleaned. You'll recall in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, HST goes on and on about the American Dream, as if the duo could locate it in a physical place, like finding the source of a river. In this case, Las Vegas.

I do not believe that was a selection based on convenience.

The American Dream has a sense of social and/or financial mobility to it, but most of all, from what I can extract, it is about an ever-present opportunity to "make it." Fail miserably? Try again. Bankrupt? Maybe you'll make a go of it this time. Effort is part of it, yes, but an acceptance of the role of pure luck is also a vital component. You can bust your ass and it will likely turn out better for you than not busting your ass, but there are no guarantees. You can only approach the table and go again. Another role of the dice or the hope that you haven't drawn a bad beat.

I will not bore you with how that works into the novel, but one point to take away was the sense that the Dream was moribund, if not already dead. A sense that credit scores, background checks, and "I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record" mentality is a noose slowly drawing shut. No more second chances, or third, or fourth. You screw up, bucko, that's it. The American Dream is now a taxidermied carcass whose silhouette we can see in the window of a house on a hill: referenced as if it were still alive, but never met.

Now, we see people who have made it big, but some section of them are products lifted from the mud and polished for public consumption. Others, when investigated, come from surprisingly fortunate backgrounds. Sons of senators' sons, as Jello Biafra put it. This has been sensed on an unconscious level since perhaps the mid-eighties.

As much as I might like people like Jello Biafra or Hunter S. Thompson, those shouldn’t be the _only_ people informing you on society.

You can completely wreck your credit and still bounce back and even prosper. I’ve seen it happen with bankruptcy and have fixed my own credit after a charge off in my youth, and now own a home, with paid off cars and student debt, and a solid cushion in savings. It takes time; everyone wants everything now, which to me is a sign of poor reasoning leading to poor decision making.

I think an important difference is: are you in dire straights because of poor decision making, or bad luck? If you consistently make poor decisions, you’ll eventually wreck your life and may not be able to get out of the hole.

If you make sound decisions, bad luck can just as easily turn into good luck. You just have to be executing when the opportunity arises. This is of course no guarantee, I definitely believe there are good people out there who were never able to make it. But that doesn’t mean that nobody good will ever make it.

To me, that is what the American Dream aspired to be. Something other than a caste or feudal system, or religious monarchy, that pretty much keeps everyone in their place, with no motivation to innovate or take a risk to try something new, and then propelling general society upwards with each breakthrough.

Gracious, I never said that they were the only people informing me on society. They make for some interesting seed quotes and ideas for further discussion. The American Dream as a concept is probably worthy of a series of books, not really something I can cram into even a page.

They’re the only ones you mentioned, so I participated in the conversation you seeded.

Care to weigh in on the other 98% of my response?

Come on, haven't you heard that Trump has declared the start of a new American Golden Age? You gotta have some faith!

No seriously, this reminds me of another "Golden Age" which according to the propaganda happened under Ceausescu in Romania when I was growing up (https://princetonbuffer.princeton.edu/2014/01/30/tales-from-...), while in reality everything was falling to pieces. I just hope Trump's age won't last as long as Ceausescu's (24 years).

Actually life was pretty good for Romanians during the "Golden Age" compared to the rest of the communist period. The problem was that we lived on credit just like Americans and when it came time to pay it, things started falling off. Ceaușescu didn't invest wisely the money from the IMF, so he started exploiting everything and everyone to the max until the debt was paid off. Just a few months afterwards the Revolution happened and he was trialed and sentenced to death.

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