Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!
More didactic and existential angst ahead!

Just as I’ve always felt that love can often be a far more potent destructive force than hate, I’ve also always felt that telling kids to dream big, and filling their heads with notions that they can be or do whatever they want to be, irrespective of reality, is a terrible thing to do.

While I’ve never been against the idea of striving to better oneself and the world around them—indeed, I think it’s one of the most important factors in building and improving human society, it doesn’t change the fact that the most essential part of the ‘dreaming’ calculus always needs to be a realistic assessment of the obstacles. Only then, can one devise strategies to neutralise, or at the very least, avoid or surmount them.

Unfortunately, in this culture of shielding children from failure or a notion that they’re ever anything less than winners, cold, stark reality often gets rudely shoved to the side, with the vain belief that simply ignoring it or denying it will make it go away.

The problem with ignoring reality is that it’s like the monsters under your bed. The longer you leave it in the dark, the more fearsome and monstrous it becomes.

A large part of my inspiration for this piece comes from my own life failures (of which I’ve had more than my share), and just how disgusted I’ve become at all the aspects and facets of our culture that still urge people to have big and unrealistic dreams, and how it’s convinced every poor person that they're actually a temporarily-embarrassed millionaire, who is just one scheme or one lottery ticket away from assuming their rightful place.

Indeed, I can claim to be stupider than most, as I played the lottery every single week for seven years and never won so much as a free ticket. I also sold Rainbow vacuum cleaners and Amway, and was exhorted in the rah-rah, pseudo-religious ‘motivational’ rallies for both to: ‘Never let anyone steal your dream’: Your dream being ‘stolen’ by being exposed to honest and critical analysis.

I can quite honestly say that I have never achieved so much as a single one of my childhood dreams, and I’ve had to accept the hard and stark fact that I simply never will. Like the vast majority of humanity, I’ve simply had to learn to do the best that I can with what I have. That might really suck, but that’s just the way it is. Instead, I’ve tried to learn to take pleasure in small things, especially if I think that they’re things that most other people simply never notice, or bother themselves with.