Living the Dream?

While I was at work today, I overheard my boss use the expression, “living the dream”. This is an expression that I hear a lot, and I’m slightly confused at to what it’s supposed to mean. Most of the time, people say it in a somewhat sarcastic or facetious way. When somebody says it in that manner, it seems to me that they are saying that their life is less than interesting.

For example, you see a friend you haven’ t seen in a while, and they ask you what you have been doing. A common response in this scenario can be that you’re “just living the dream”. This response seems to be said when someone feels they don’t have anything too noteworthy to report. Now, I may be reading into this statement wrong, but that seems to be the underlying meaning of the statement. You know, they aren’t doing anything that exciting, just going to school, going to work, dating, blah, blah, blah.

It’s funny because I’ve heard this statement in conjunction with the lifestyle of a college grad that still lives in Provo. As I’ve tried to explain to people what I’ve been doing, my friends have sometimes pointed out that I’m just “living the dream”. Basically implying that I’m doing nothing with my life by still living in Provo.

So, why is “living the dream” not a good thing? Don’t all of us hope that we’ll go after and achieve our dreams? I think that most of us do. However, “the dream” is often associated with societal norms and expectations that we’ve been raised with all of our lives. So yes, “living the dream” should be a negative statement, because if we’re living “THE dream”, we’re not living our own.

My dream is not to graduate from college and go work for a big corporation in New York, Boston, or D.C. My dream is not to find a “career”, and work for somebody else for my entire life. My dream is not to go to medical school, law school, dental school, or get my MBA. My dream does not align with a lot of the normal, predictable, and expected post-graduation plans of college grads. So, when I say I’m “living the dream”, I’m doing just that. I’m not doing what I want to do, rather, I’m doing what I’ve been taught I should want to do.

That’s really why I’m going on this trip. Too many people settle for “living the dream”, because it just seems too risky or scary to go after what they really want. Even then, often times people have a hard time deciphering between what they really want and what they’ve been taught they should want. I kept quitting jobs without having any other plan, because I never wanted to just get comfortable and settle for life. I hear people all the time say that they don’t love their job, “but it pays the bills”. That, to me, is living the dream.

So, are you living the dream?