chat

Short answer: No, because people in in industrialized societies aren't taught how to dream properly.

Loooooong answer: Anybody here read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho? If you haven't, don't. It's bad. But it was hugely popular in the early aughts when The Secret was also kicking around and it has a similar vibe. A boy dreams of gold buried near the pyramids and a fortune-teller says it's real and he should go looking for it. He sets out and along the way meets people who have Given Up and settle for mediocrity, and he turns their lives around with The Power of Entrepreneurship because anything is possible when you are chasing your dream.

He meets the titular alchemist, who gives him some gold for his journey and reaches the pyramids at long last. But he finds no treasure and gets beaten up by thieves who also steal his alchemist gold. Defeated, he goes home and meets someone who listens to his story, scoffs, and says that dreams are stupid; he keeps dreaming of treasure buried in the protagonist's back yard, would you believe it? Our hero goes home and finds the treasure right where the man said it would be.

The explicit moral of the story is that you're never supposed to give up even when chasing your dream and that if you are sincere in your pursuit and dogged enough things will find a way and the universe will manifest a bounty for you.

The implicit moral is that we're all just being jerked sround for the amusement of the demiurge who rewards and punishes us arbitrarily.

The actual moral is that it's always someone else's dream. The protagonist's dream didn't come true, some random dude's did; he just stole it. And what was there? Wealth, big whoop. Yeah, it's actually a metaphor for whatever you desire most in the world, but, and let's be real with ourselves here, for the majority of Oprah's book club that desire is wealth.

The fact is that people are bad at predicting what will make them happy, both because things are always better in our imaginations and second because the hedonic treadmill is baked into our brains and always makes what we don't have feel superior to what we do. And capitalism swoops in and hijacks all that machinery so spectacularly well that the world's wealthiest countries are also it's most miserable (also some if its happiest, paradoxically, but I'd argue Nordic social democracies do well at meeting the basic material needs of their citizens, at least).

The way off the hedonic treadmill is to actively practice gratitude, but that's predicated on having your basic material needs met (no one should be made to. Feel grateful for an empty stomach).

I feel like this is mostly preaching to the choir because folks here are empathetic and understand that, however appealing, the lifestyles of the wealthy are wasteful and unsustainable, but I think it's worth pointing out that dreaming in the developed world is so ruthlessly constrained by society and culture that it's no longer useful, if ever it was.