Learning How to Dream
Layoffs, stillness, and taking the scenic route
I’ve been out of a job for about two months now.
The version of myself who spent many of my formative years achieving, optimizing, and striving would probably be sick. Of course, she’d never had a corporate job before (and I’m not sure she even wanted one.) The 25-year-old me with a few years of work experience, however, is relieved. Like…deep exhale, full belly laugh, the sun is sunnier relieved. Not because I’m leaving behind any traumatic work tale, but because this is one of the first periods of my adult life where I’ve felt like I could just stop and reflect. Practice what life could look like if I designed it myself. Dream a little.
For years, we’ve been asking interviewees on As You Are some variation of the question “What does your dream life look like?” It’s typically one people have to take a few seconds to reckon with. Almost on cue, they’ll say “That’s a good one” and release a contemplative hum. After a few more, likely as the awareness of silence hits them, most continue on to talk about a dream job, dream city, or the like. I almost always concede to that interpretation of the question. I’ve come to learn that asking people about dreams evokes very specific frames of thinking. Dreams, as most of us understand them, are comprised of exciting careers, gorgeous homes, and the perfect location to match (that we have no trouble affording due to the aforementioned sexy career.) Despite the popularization of “not dreaming of labor,” we surely do spend a lot of time dreaming about the presumed outputs of labor (Are you still with me?)
Of course, this mindset isn’t specific to anyone we’ve interviewed. How much time does the average person spend imagining beyond what’s true right now, today? When thinking about what we really want from our lives, how “unrealistic,” excited, and specific do we even allow ourselves to get?
For most of us (myself included) it’s much easier to fall back on our models of what makes up a life than it is to contemplate and expose what makes up our dreams. Not just our “dream job” or “dream house” or whatever other framework that’s been offered up to us, but our unfettered imagining of our lives and everything they could contain.
As author and professor Sadiya Hartman says, “So much of the work of oppression is policing the imagination.” In just a few years post-grad, I see evidence of this struggle everywhere. Interests have to be made marketable. Passions turn to side-projects you revisit occasionally. The fullness of life some of us were lucky to experience in school, stitched together by a range of classes, social events, and extracurriculars, gets flattened as we enter the workforce. Suddenly you’re one thing. A consultant. A marketer. An assistant. And just as quickly, your sense of time and direction is loaned out to someone else. Life exists on the cycles of Monday to Friday, Saturday to Sunday, and 9 to 5. Not because we’ve personally decided those periods hold any significance, but because we learn to organize life around cycles of labor and decompression. Always running. Towards someone’s metric of progress during the day, and as far away from it as possible at night. It’s one in a line of many compromises many of us have already made in hopes of achieving something akin to safety and success.
On its face, there’s nothing wrong with this model. But we should remain conscious of the fact that before we ever get to experiment and come to our own conclusions about how we should live, the path is laid out in front of us and we evangelize these ideas as if they were our own. Without our intervention, capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and their offshoots will always hand us organizing frameworks for our feelings and needs. The human need for security is translated into striving towards luxury housing, investments, and acquiring capital. Love is streamlined into professional accolades, monogamous, heterosexual marriages, and 2.5 kids. Freedom is equated with retirement, entrepreneurship, and vacation days. With these images propped up and fed to us as success, there is no need to consider, contemplate, or collaborate on new answers.
In these slower days, with more room to breathe and less time on Zoom meetings than ever, I’m trying to teach myself how to imagine again. From re-imagining my career, my relationships, and how I engage with my community to how I heal and decompress, how I spend my time, and why.
In moments of uncertainty or fear of what’s next, existing frameworks can give us direction. Keep moving forward, climb the ladder, and reach new peaks. In return, you have a shot at a good (or at least better) life. But there are gaps in the equation. For one, there’s no ceiling for when you’ve finally done enough. How many promotions until you are considered successful? How many houses until you’re safe? How many friends until you’re loved? With no clear answers, our lives become characterized by the pursuit: more, better, faster, and again.
What if there’s a better way?
Despite my craving for certainty and speed, my clearest and most honest realizations are coming to me in the slowness. By stepping off the treadmill and leaning into uncertainty, I see evidence of new lives everywhere. In January, I joined Harlem Run for their community run for Palestine. We the People NYC just brought their hot meal and donation program to my neighborhood. I’m having regular conversations with friends and family about better aligning our daily lives with our purpose and desires. People are striving to find moments to create their dreams all around us. Big or small, they all serve as reminders that much of what we want for our futures, individually and collectively, can be created in the now.
Imagining is completely outside of the toolbox most of us have been given in this life. Instead, we are handed tools to decompress, isolate, “heal” and continue on what is largely the same path. For our own sake and the sake of the world around us, we need more people to dream. Not just about possessions and power and acquisition, but about all the world could be if we re-considered what was handed to us. Really, you and I have to learn to be braver. More inventive. More ridiculous. Everything that comes next depends on it.
So, if you were at all wondering, no, I’m not upset about being laid off. Endings can be a wonderful reminder that you can start over anytime.
Some questions I’m asking myself these days:
What would it look like for you to have enough? How does that vision impact those around you? What’s the most fulfilling path to arrive there? What do you want to see and experience?
Can you take the scenic route?
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This was so beautiful! It reminded me of Tricia Hersey's 'Rest is Resistance.' She talks about how one of our most revolutionary abilities is our ability to dream, to imagine a better world. And that slowness and rest is the only way to leave room to do just that. I think she would say that your ancestors would smile, watching you take the scenic route they dreamed of.
I really enjoyed reading your article! To be honest, whenever someone asked me, 'What does your dream life look like?' I used to hesitate. In my head, there were things I felt I 'should' say, like moving abroad, investing in a house, or starting my own business, just for all these external validation to impress others. I also think many of us tend to answer this way, making our 'dreams' seem more tangible. So many of us (myself included) are afraid to actually dream.