Two cars parked in the driveway of a house that looks just like every other house in the neighborhood. Row upon row of the same cookie cutter home, the same cookie cutter dog, the same cookie cutter people. It’s suburbia, the American Dream, the thing you’ve been working for your whole life, and the thing you’ll probably work to keep or achieve for the rest of it. Many of us laugh at this Stepford-burbia, we think of it as an anachronism of the 1950s, but the narrative of a “good,” middle-class lifestyle has remained remarkably similar, to what it was sixty years ago.
What was the first responsibility you had, aside from household chores? It was doing well in school. You had to do well in school, your parents said, because you had to get into a good prep school, or a good college. And you had to do that so you could get a good job, which you needed to make money. And you needed that so you could get the house, and the two BMWs, and then have enough money to send your kids to the better college, and the cycle repeats itself. Sounds like a pretty good formula, huh? It’s comfortable, it’s self-perpetuating, and everyone gets to live a fairly lavish lifestyle. That is, if it all works according to plan.
But even when it works, the classic American Dream is not without its problems. It’s a dream based on things, on possessions and appearances more than anything else. That’s why you can picture the American Dream so clearly. It is a picture, a construction, as sure as a painting is a construction of an artist’s imagination, the world as filtered through one man’s eyes. The American Dream is a projection as well. It’s not everyone’s dream, but it’s sold as a one size fits all aspiration. It’s marked, more than anything else, by certain objects. These talismans convey membership, or belonging in a club, that while supposedly accessible to everyone, is actually quite exclusive.
I recently went back and watched one of my favorite movies, American Beauty, which can definitely be viewed as a scathing indictment of the bourgeois American middle class lifestyle. We can sit and talk all day about the inequities of the American Dream, how it is not as accessible to minorities, immigrants or the chronically poor. Those are important problems, and we should be talking about them, but I’m more interested in the fact that even once we get there, once we achieve the American Dream, we’re left wanting. That’s what I think American Beauty does so well. It presents an outwardly perfect world, the world of new German automobiles parked in rose bush lined driveways, the world of “success,” and “happiness,” and dives deeper. It churns up the rotten soil that so much of the American Dream has been built on. Kevin Spacey’s character, Lester, feels like he’s only just begun to wake up from a coma, once he starts rejecting the life that he’s built, or that’s been built for him.
We’ve increasingly come to define ourselves in terms of our occupation. Work takes the center stage in our lives. It’s what we organize around, not something we organize to fit into our lives. The whole point of having a good job is to be comfortable, to live the “good life,” of 2.5 kids, a green lawn and maybe golf on Sundays. What we don’t often talk about, is the sacrifice that these things demand. Hard work is assumed to be an unmitigated good in American culture. It’s “what built America,” if you ask any politician, even an extreme leftist. Hard work, has become the unquestionable ideal of 21st century American life. Can you imagine finally admitting to your parents or boss that you’re lazy? Can you imagine finally admitting to yourself that you don’t really like to work hard? That you’d rather spend your time some other way? I know the counter argument here; without work, leisure time becomes meaningless. But I’d argue that isn’t true.
Today, we have trouble accepting leisure time for two reasons. One being our implicit guilt about leisure. I know of very few people who can truly relax anymore, myself included. I grew up in a household were the New England Protestant work ethic was ground into our minds through hard labor. I remember once, on a Sunday afternoon, sitting on my steps just looking out at the world. My father asked my I was up to, and I told him I was bored. Well, that was the last time I ever said that to my father. Ever. I spent the rest of the day, until nightfall digging holes, planting shrubs essentially being a human draft animal. This was not a one time occurrance, and I don’t really resent it, but it did plant the idea in my head, from a very early age, that if I was having fun, or that if I was slacking off without having earned my keep beforehand, I was being bad. Everyone has those days. Those days when you wake up at 1 p.m. and do nothing but relax to some quality episodes of Parental Control, or Jersey Shore. But you always feel a little bad afterwards, am I right? There’s that same feeling you had when you snuck too many cookies as a kid (or forty year old man, you can ask my father what happened to all those girl scout cookies my sister “lost,” one year.)
Secondly, Americans in particular have forgotten how to have leisure time. Even our children live tightly controlled lives, where play dates are scheduled in the same way as quarterly earnings reports. Ever been on a cruise? There are literally pages upon pages of organized activities. Why? Because no one knows what to do with themselves once they’re off the hamster wheel! It’s literally beyond most of our imaginations to sit and contemplate our lives, to try to figure out our place in the world. But it wasn’t always like that. Once upon a time, people were defined by their interests outside of work. Your interests were what defined you not your job. Work was just a way to make money, and money making itself had the tinge of the vulgar to it. It was the ends, not the means. I can remember growing up, even 15 years ago, money, and to some extent, work, were somewhat taboo subjects. We absolutely did not talk about it at dinner. But today, money is often the first thing we bring up in all of our conversations. The bad economy is certainly part of it. Money is on everyone’s mind because it’s scarce. And work comes up by extension. Our post industrial economy is a knowledge economy. Instead of creating cars and toasters, we create ideas and concepts. But just as Leonardo DiCaprio says in Inception, there’s nothing more insidious, nothing harder to control, than an idea. Like a lost dog, our jobs, by their very nature, follow us home. When we produce ideas for a living, they have a way of worming their way into our consciousness. They suffuse our lives. We’re working whether we’re at work, in the shower, in bed, we can always be working on an idea. And technology makes these ideas even more insidious. We are always on call, we are always available via email, text, or smoke signal.
I think consumerism though, is the bigger culprit. We’re increasingly defined by what we own. Up until very recently, maybe twenty to thirty years ago, consumer society was not lauded in the same way that it is today. Of course people owned things and were proud of the new house, or the new car in the driveway. But there was a culture that prized ingenuity and frugality over ostentatious expenditure. It’s not a coincidence that the dramatic rise in consumer society has seen its mirror image in negative savings rates for the average American household. Old people will always deride their spendthrift children, and hearken back to the frugality of a bygone era. And to some extent, they’re right. But on the other hand, there are larger structural forces at work here. Every kid has an iPhone, so, rightly or wrongly, every parent is going to feel the pressure to max out the credit card in order to get their kid a little slice of Apple. And that’s just the small stuff. We’re constantly bombarded with the message that what we have is not enough. A Chevy owner is told he needs a Lexus, a Lexus owner needs a BMW, a BMW owner needs a Lambo. It’s a relentless cycle of discomfort, that tells us with a little more money, a little more stuff, a little more “hard work,” we can have it all. We can win the game of life. But you can’t win, because the corporations who want to keep selling you stuff won’t ever let you. If you felt comfortable, you wouldn’t need to consume.
Our work ethic has gotten the better of us. We think we need to work hard, to achieve this certain middle class lifestyle, but we often can’t even enjoy it once we get there, because we’ve been so psychologically mutilated by the job market, our family, our friends, and ourselves. One of the first scenes in American Beauty is Lester watching his wife cut her perfect roses from her perfect shrubs, on her perfect lawn, in her perfectly matched gardening clogs. She then comes back in the house and puts them in a vase on display. But if you watch closely, throughout the movie, they wither and die. Lester’s wife is cold and domineering, and fails to nurture even these little flowers, never mind her husband or daughter, although she garners great respect, and indeed, demands great respect for herself because she is a “successful,” real estate agent. But at one point, Lester’s wife fails to sell a property. She has defined herself so much as a business person, as someone that “makes the sale,” though, that when she fails, she breaks down, and beats herself up literally and metaphorically.
I see this happening more and more in real life. We see so many people, perhaps you are one, who like Lester’s wife, did everything “right.” Went to school, got good grades, worked hard, maybe even found a job. But then maybe the job doesn’t work out, or you get laid off. Or maybe we manage to hold on to the job, but we quickly realize that buying a home might never be in the cards, or that all those vacations to foreign lands we had planned might never become realities. In large part because of the recession, the formula is breaking down. When I went to college, only four years ago, my parents told me to do whatever I wanted and to enjoy it while it lasted. Now, as my sister begins the college hunt, they’re pushing accounting or nursing on my sister like scalpers pushing tickets two minutes before the show starts. In four short years, idealism and intellectual curiosity has been replaced completely by “get a good job.” But disturbingly, even this may not be enough. Even those of us who “do everything right,” who pursue a “good,” major like accounting, or computer science, might find themselves out of work, through no fault of their own. Even the last Messiah, “hard work,” may not save them. In this despair though, we might have an existential crisis, or, we might self reflect. The equation no longer works, even though we’ve put in all the right variables, college, hard work, being really really good looking, etc. We might begin to ask ourselves if we’ve been doing all the right things, but based on the wrong premises. Often, we have to break down what’s old, what’s rotting from the inside, to make room for the new. It’s painful, but when things break down, we have to start thinking outside of our old conceptual pens, and only then, can we explore new possibilities, somewhere outside the stifling confines of American middle class life.
