Against the American Dream
Hello! I took an unplanned late-summer vacation from the newsletter, because, well, I didn’t feel like doing it for a while. I’m trying to honor my own rhythms and intuitions more, which is hard in a deadline-driven career and world, and I appreciate the space I have here to not only articulate but also live out some of my ideas and values, even the challenging ones. If we don’t rest when we need to, we won’t have the energy to do the work that’s calling us. We probably won’t even be able to hear the call.
So on that note, an on-theme recommendation this week: this interview, on the podcast Hurry Slowly, with the author and activist Mia Birdsong, about the what the toxic individualism of the American Dream costs us and how the people living on its margins are the true innovators of our time. The American Dream, in Birdsong’s framing, is a fusion of patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism tied up in a bow and sold to us as the key to happiness and fulfillment. It hurts not only those who are oppressed by or shut out of it, but also those who are ostensibly succeeding at it.
The people who I’ve met, who are succeeding at the American dream are often incredibly lonely or just feel a sense that there’s something that they’re supposed to be feeling that they’re not. There’s some satisfaction that they’re supposed to have that they haven’t reached, and they don’t know why.
I was in the live audience for this interview about a month ago, because I’m participating in a course led by Hurry Slowly host Jocelyn K. Glei. The podcast in general has been a pandemic lifeline for me; on my sister’s recommendation I started listening from the beginning last summer and it has accompanied me on my slow journey out of productivity culture, despite being, or at least starting out as, a podcast about productivity. If you’re just starting to think about extracting yourself from those ideas, the very first episode about taking control of your time is an excellent place to start. (It’s an interview with one of the founders of Basecamp, so I was really disappointed to later see the company step in it so completely when it came to recognizing their employees’ whole selves.) If you want to jump in when the podcast explicitly begins its turn away from productivity culture, start with the episode called “Who Are You Without the Doing?” And if you’ve been fully galaxy-brained by the pandemic already and don’t want to look back, the Q&A episode “Tender Discipline,” released in late November 2020, made me feel so validated and seen.