To achieve the American Dream, you must be successful. But our current definition of success is unattainable for most of us. Just when you think you have everything covered, the rates go up or you are fired or disqualified. Or you have a birthday. And then you become a “loser”. According to the current groupthink, the vast majority of us are losers.

To be considered successful, you must first and foremost make tons of cash. You must have a fantastic, exciting job. You must be CEO or at the very least, Senior VP. You must own a four-bedroom house, a family sedan, a motorcycle and/or a boat, and a two-seater sports car. You must decorate the house with new draperies and furnishings every two years. The house has to be kept spotless and smelling fresh, the latter hopefully through a little plug-in gizmo that spews artificial lemon verbena scent throughout your travertine tile-floored manse.

Your children must be stellar scholars, captains of the football team, chess champions and violin prodigies. You must have good health insurance, belong to a gym, and have a Bowflex in your heated garage. You must send your children to Ivy League schools. You must buy every new gadget on the market within 24 hours of its release. You must take expensive vacations and have a second home in the country—or at the very least, take cruises and own a timeshare in Tahoe or Hawaii.

For women there are a few extra things you need to be successful. Number One, you can’t age. Number Two, you must be a size one. You have to wear the absolute current fashion: nothing with more than a two-month shelf life. High heels are a must. Don’t forget the foundation, stylish make-up, perfectly coiffed and dyed hair, and polished fingernails. You must be tanned, gym-toned, get Botox injections and look perfect at all times. And don’t get caught driving the minivan. So embarrassing!

These out-of-reach goals are even more ridiculous considering that basic survival is hardly achievable anymore. My generation has been spending what’s left of their devastated 401Ks taking care of their elderly parents, putting their kids through college and trying to pay down an underwater mortgage. Health care is unaffordable for the majority. How the hell are we supposed to pay for the new roof or sewer line repairs or the dog’s hip operation?

But the worst component of the devastation of the middle class is that our culture considers us all failures. No matter how hard you worked, no matter if you went to graduate school, no matter if you followed all the rules, if you still came up short, you are a loser.

So where do we go from here? First, we need to realize that we are not losers. We’re experiencing a global shift in wealth distribution, and corporate greed on a scale that hasn’t been seen since the 1920s. The skyrocketing cost of health care is busting the budgets of the self-employed and making it too expensive for businesses to hire people over 50. Jobs are becoming obsolete at record pace. None of this is our fault. All of these factors are beyond our control. But how we deal with these changes is within our control. We need to become much more flexible in the ways we earn our living and how we spend our money. We need to save more. But more importantly, we need to redefine success.

We need to realize that society’s “markers of success” are made up, mostly by advertisers. And that the goals focus on the external. Whatever you do to your body will not bring you deep, lasting satisfaction. You will still age and therefore “fail”. That new Mercedes is used the moment you drive it off the lot. Spending hours of time distracting yourself with TV, smart phones and iPods will only make you feel more isolated. You actually must interact with people face-to-face to satisfy your basic, human need to connect with others. Two-word text messages do not promote bonding. They promote ADD.

Happiness comes from our interior lives, not our outside shell. Happiness comes from finding meaning in our lives. Beyond our basic survival, happiness can’t be bought.

The new definition of success should start with some questions: What will put food on my table and bring meaning to my life? Do I really need to own a house? What do I really need? What do I like? Not what you think you should like, but what you actually like. Work on widening your choices. Due to the current economic upheaval, you may need to change careers or move. Consider everything and everywhere that interests you, no matter what anyone else thinks. Stretch. Try something you never thought you could do. And if you’re broke, don’t be too picky. Do what it takes to survive and forget how you look. People who think lesser of you because you took a food server job after you lost your corporate position aren’t your friends. Besides, you never know where any job will lead. You never know where your next opportunity may come from.

Palliative care specialist Bronnie Ware interviewed many people on their deathbeds. She asked them what their regrets were. The number one response? I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

When you’re dying and reviewing your life, what will you be thinking? Will you be proud of your McMansion, Gucci slippers and plasma screen TV? Or the hours you spent in a tanning bed? Or the years you spent staring at the tiny screen on your smart phone instead of experiencing the world around you?

The American Dream has been co-opted by our corporate-profit-driven culture and has become the American Nightmare. We deserve better. Our dreams should emphasize emotional fulfillment, not isolate us and make us feel like failures.

©2011, Janet Periat

The new American zeitgeist is all about being a child. We want services, but we don’t want to pay for them. We want others to take care of us, but we don’t want to care for anybody. Accountability is out. Most people don’t want to work. People want to be famous for doing nothing, look young forever, wear the latest fashions, drive the latest cars, go on fabulous vacations, have trophy houses and amazing jobs where they get paid to do nothing. The biggest dream of all? Winning the lottery and spending the rest of their lives on a beach. Basically, everyone’s greatest desire is to be a spoiled brat.

When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to grow up. My parents had cool cocktail parties and everything was about being fifty because that was the power age. Now it’s old age. No one wants to be fifty. No one wants to be an adult. The ideal age in our current culture is twenty-four. If you are any of the other seventy-nine ages of your life, you are flawed. Taking on responsibility is selling out. Being a child for life is the goal.

I reject this paradigm. I want to be more of a grown up. I want to rise to challenges, ride the waves of life and take care of myself. I want to pay my bills, live within my means, fix my house and do all the adult things required of me without complaint. I want to feel grateful for what I have, not upset with what I don’t. And I want to accept my changing features gracefully.

Yet as I look for role models in society to help me on my quest for true adulthood, I find none. All I see around me is a mass of spoiled children crying because life is happening to them. Oh, poor me, I had a birthday. Oh, poor me, I had to go to work today. Oh, poor me, I’m underwater on my mortgage. Oh, poor me, I have a crappy job because when I had the opportunity to go to college, I turned it down. Oh, poor me, I quit high school and now I can’t even get a job. Oh, poor me, I want a new plasma TV, but I had to get tires instead. Oh, poor me, I have to take care of my children.

Certainly, things are changing rapidly. Certainly, living on this planet is difficult work. Certainly for baby boomers—even if you followed all the rules and did everything you were told to do—you’ve still lost your retirement and your job. Granted, it sucks. But so what? Living on this planet has always been difficult. It was much harder for our forefathers and mothers. They didn’t have washing machines. Or unemployment. Or Social Security or Medicare. But what they did have was a work ethic and an acute sense of survival. They concentrated on planting seeds today for fruition tomorrow. They spent within their means. They learned to reinvent themselves no matter what was thrown at them.

My great-grandmother, Josephine Periat, left her abusive husband in Switzerland and came to America through Ellis Island when she was 26. With my six-year-old grandfather in tow, Grandma took a ship around Cape Horn to San Francisco, got a job as a cook for a rich couple, saved money, bought a bakery, started an auto body shop, started a car dealership, grew most of her own food, embroidered a million chairs, cooked Thanksgiving dinner until she was 80 and never complained. Most people I know bitch about every single thing they’ve ever had to do.

What Grandma knew was this: life is about uncertainty. Life is about challenges. Life is about hard work. There are no guarantees and the only thing you can count on is change. Your only job is to feed, clothe and house yourself until you die. And you don’t expect others to do it for you.

But somehow we’ve lost touch with these basic principles of survival. 75% of young people today are unfit for military duty because they either didn’t graduate from high school or they’re obese or have criminal records. Only 25% of Americans have a college degree. What the HELL ARE THESE PEOPLE THINKING? What do they think their futures will hold? Unless they attend a trade school, they are SCREWED. Yet kids are dropping out by the hundreds of thousands. They don’t want to go to school and they don’t want to work, but they want to be rich and famous and drive fancy cars. HUH? How did these kids get so delusional?

Our collective dream says it all: being famous for doing nothing and living on a beach being waited on hand and foot. This dream is the perfect model of infancy. You sit in your high chair and Mommy coos over you and takes complete care of you. Babies for life. Ick.

What I want to know is how did we get this out of touch? Over the last forty years, adulthood has become equated with loss of freedom and therefore, loss of joy. When the exact opposite is true. Children are not free. They are dependent. The only people with power over themselves and their environments are self-sufficient adults. The only way for an adult to be happy is to be an adult.

Yet our youth-obsessed culture ignores this simple fact. “Adultolescence” now extends to most people under thirty. A third of all 30-year-old single men are still living with their parents. One third. My folks and ancestors owned homes and businesses and had most of their kids by that age. Not only did they care for themselves, they cared for others.

If our current trend continues, the future of America looks like this: a giant playpen full of crying babies with nuclear capabilities and no adult supervision.

©2011, Janet Periat