Lately I have been contemplating the price of dreams.

I came up with the pyramid of success because I realized that no one ever talks about the cost of chasing your dreams. Maybe some of us are born lucky but most of us normies who want to make their dreams come true must sacrifice a lot, in the dark, for many years, to chase their dreams. And most of us who chase those dreams will still mostly be just dead bodies and never get to where we want to go.

They say New York is full a dreamers and it’s definitely true. I mean California is also full of dreamers but over there they seem to gloss over the fact that a million of us had to be sacrificed to produce one success story. In New York, we lean into the grit. We don’t try to gloss over how hard it is to make it.

Probably because the city itself constantly wants to eat you up and spit you out. But what the hell I’m still here. New Yorkers both love and hate the city, it’s Stockholm syndrome. A true New Yorker spends a lot of time complaining about the city, but then for some reason can’t ever truly leave. How inexplicable. Here, having a washing machine in your apartment is something to celebrate. Having your own washing machine is it’s own form of “making it” in New York. Something so banal and ubiquitous as having access to your own washing machine – is a struggle.

So is the hustle culture just another way for capitalism to keep the rest of us down?  The dream factory must continue churning out success stories to keep us going so that we continue to lap it up and give our blood, sweat and tears to maintain the system.  Definitely no sane person would choose this. But what do you do if you are afflicted by this bug and your soul is just restless? What do you do if you aren’t a person who can just be happy with a house in the burbs and a quiet life? I guess you have no choice but to lean into it. What’s the alternative? Feeling dead inside?

So you wake up every morning and you let the sickness run it’s daily course, it’s easier to just give into it than to fight it. It gives you a reason to keep going. Even if in the end you’ll just end up a dead body. Keeping the dream alive is what keeps you going and if we’re all going to die anyway, wouldn’t it be better to at least have been able to say that you went for it? And on and on it goes.

-W.