Swimming upstream for the American Dream
I’m sitting on the aft deck of a sailing yacht in the Caribbean, just off the coast of Jost Van Dyke. (I ask you to suspend your judgment about entitlement for just a moment, as I know how ridiculous that sounds, believe me.) The balmy trade winds chug steadily through our quiet mooring field. I hear the lapping of the water across the transom, the gentle hum of a generator, and the modest clinking of some rigging in the mast. Gentle verdant islands surround this protected harbor, dotted with colorful vacation homes. A few high-elevation clouds scud across the blue sky. The cerulean sea glints in the early afternoon light. Everyone else is dozing after brunch. And I’m feeling unease, not contentment. I need to be working right now—paying bills, filing taxes, making social media posts, answering emails, writing blog posts (ahem), and answering questions from staff. I have three Dharma books to finish (read: start) reading. I should take a shower and perform daily engine maintenance. I should figure out how to refuel in the nearest marina. I should really practice yoga and meditate. I should think seriously about my path and journal about it. There is urgency all around. My chest feels tight and I feel a sense of imminent irritability. A frenetic butterfly flits erratically across our beamy catamaran.
In my travels abroad over the last decade, I’ve heard myriad praise and critique of Americans.
A young Tibetan Buddhist monk told me he couldn’t wait to visit America. I asked him why, and he just shrugged shyly, and said he imagined America like a different planet. Sitting next to him in a quiet Nepalese mountain monastery, I agreed, ruefully. A Spanish sailor I met once in a dive bar told me mistily that America is somewhere that “everyone” wants to visit because “they want to know if it’s just like the movies.” A middle-class Costa Rican mother whose daughter worked as a seasonal domestic laborer for a wealthy American family said she feared America would change her daughter—she didn’t elaborate and I didn’t press for more. I visited that daughter in America, too: she said she would do anything to stay in the States, now that she had seen how much possibility lay here. A friendly Norwegian tourist recommended avoiding popular American tourist spots: Americans don’t come to visit, he said, they come to take over. And a French lover once told me on a blistering summer evening in his rose garden, sweating glass of Muscadet in hand, that Americans have no culture because they’re so bent on being someone else. On our first date, he had asked where are you from?, and I rattled off my ancestors’ European nations of origin. He smirked (French men do this well, speaking of overbroad stereotypes), then said: But you’re American—all Americans tell exotic stories about themselves, but in reality, you’re just American. Later, I dreamily mused about wanting to run a French bistro, and he said rather harshly: Leave that to us.
A common thread runs through these scenes: we Americans, consciously and subconsciously, have the desire (and sometimes, the power) to write our own stories as The Main Character of the Great American Novel. Something simultaneously empowering and brash in American culture gives (some privileged few of) us the license to write these stories (speaking here, especially, of white Americans with social status, power, and ample means, with deference to millions of Americans for whom this stereotype does not apply due to race, ethnicity, socioeconomic inequality, sex/gender discrimination, and more). The American Dream is rooted in self-actualization, the pinnacle of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Start as nobody, end up POTUS: or so the illusion goes. This myth imbues us with a single impulse: strive and you will arrive.
To what end?
We sacrifice:
Health, in the name of dogged workaholism (rise and grind!)
Wealth, in the name of escaping from workaholism (extravagant vacations), keeping up with the Joneses, and “rewarding” ourselves for the workaholism
Authentic storytelling, in the name of crafting the perception of living The Dream Life on social media (#goodvibesonly)
Intimacy with friends, family, and partners, in the name of servicing burnout by doom-scrolling and withdrawal
Soulful connection with our own hearts, in the name of “personal growth” acquired from self-help podcasts, then psychologizing and intellectualizing our feelings
Rest, in the name of productivity (read: guilt, shame, and even a misguided sense of carpe diem)
I know these sacrifices because I have made them myself, I am making them now, even though I know better, because I learned this is how we live. Call it a Puritanical call to productivity, call it addictive behavior, call it self-sabotage, call it blindness: I get in my own way.
Can you relate?
We swim upstream for our dreams, believing that, somewhere up there, we’ll find them. Do we? In Finding Nemo, Dory teaches us this mantra: just keep swimming. The American Dream tells us: keep committing, keep hustling, keep climbing. Or else what? We will be average? We will drown into irrelevance? My striving leaves me so dysregulated that I cannot rest, even when I’m perched on the transom of a Caribbean catamaran. How do we stop swimming?
Here’s the thing: Finding your flow means both swimming upstream and drifting down. “Flow state” and “endless hustle state” are not the same. Finding your flow paradoxically requires slowing down first—to read the wind, the tide, and the currents of your life. Ask first: what does flow feel like in me? (Instead of: what should flow feel like in me? Or what does flow look like in others?) Forget the motivational reels about empowerment and grinding and success: quiet your heart, sink within, and take stock of your life—the last week, the last month, the last decade. When did you feel most like yourself? When did you experience contentment? When did you feel like enough? When did you know yourself best?
Flow states begin with intentional, soft reflection, not flow itself.
And on that note, I’m shutting down and going for a swim.
Mind your flow,
JennyBess
