Somewhere along the way, the American dream became less about the white picket fence and a middle class job. Instead of aspiring to a life with all of your choices made easier for you, we instead hope for the ability to make MORE choices.
The beauty of abundant higher education is that you can choose what you want to be educated in. As time has gone on, students have discovered that you never really even have to be locked into the major you chose first (or second, or fifth…even if it’s been three or four years…who wants to leave college anyway??). You can choose to get any of a variety of graduate degrees, even if they have nothing to do with what you studied in undergrad. You can choose any state you’d like to live in, any spouse you’d like to marry, whether or not to switch to someone else’s spouse mid-game, no children or twelve, a job with NASA or on Wall street or learning how to scuba dive to clean the tanks at the local aquarium (I didn’t make that up). You can choose anything.
Fewer and fewer people care about keeping up with the Joneses, because that means making the same choices as the Joneses. Everybody wants to be able to make their own choices. A really great option might become hideous in the eyes of someone being forced to take it. Happiness is being increasingly defined by the variability of your life, and how free you are to change it (whether you want to, or plan to, or not).
Don’t get me wrong, people still kind of like the white picket fence. They just really like knowing they could paint it metallic periwinkle if they so desired.
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