"The American Dream" is just a myth we tell ourselves

[Alan V]

My issue, though, is that "upward mobility" is not a good indicator of societal health. To me, it is this: if you are a hard working person who provides something useful to society, are you being shit on or not? The problem I have with capitalism (contemporary or otherwise) is that the vast majority of people who actually DO something useful for society are shat upon just because they haven't figured out the puzzle of "upward mobility."

"Upward mobility" is a shitty metric by which to gauge the health of a society. A better metric, I propose, is this: if you work 40 hours a week, can you afford decent healthcare and education? If this were the metric used to determine how "wealthy" a nation was, America might be lobbed in with the third world (albeit at the top of the third world).

Oh, I agree. But who exactly said the American Dream was always, or even usually, a good thing? My uncle was cheap to the point of being mean, even though we was wealthy. Similarly, my sister still works to make more money, even though she could have retired over a decade ago and has no real plans about how to spend the money she has already made. They both invested their money to make more.

Meanwhile the people who could really use even a portion of that money do without. The best you can say for people like my uncle and sister is that they invest in the companies we all work for. But you would think that since most companies create consumer products, even they could do better if more people had more money to spend on their products.

I personally lost my desire to be wealthy after reading Walden when I was a teenager, and have been quite content with less than my parents. So the American Dream lost its meaning for me personally long ago. And of course my sister likely thinks of me as a failure because of that. I know my parents were disappointed in me. But oh well, I had better things to do with my time than to pursue ambitions I didn't agree with. At least my sister made my parents proud.

So I guess I'm saying that some people can still be successful believing in myths like the American Dream -- at least within their social circles. Why should they be thought different than any other group of believers?