The Pursuit of Life Dreams
We all had our dreams of being actors/actresses, professional athletes, investment bankers, doctors, lawyers, medical practitioners, models, an executive of a major company, and the like. Some of us devote years, or even our entire lives into reaching our end goals, only to fail in disappointment and end up lost in the normal crowd.
So what happens to those who fail? Many accept defeat, drift into odd jobs, get lonely, chase a woman, knock her up, call it a day and are rarely to be heard of again.
Some fight on, continuously chasing the lost dream as long as some glimmer of hope remains. The ones in the Rat Race of Vancouver and Toronto cities who borrow more and more money to do degree after degree, diploma after diploma, or designation after designation, shake your hand in hopes of just one more network connection that could potentially lead to that glorified office job, or volunteer/intern for free at a firm kissing the management’s feet for a chance at a job. Motivation stems from the city boy dream of driving a Mercedes Benz among the city skyline with a trophy wife in the passenger seat after a long day of office meetings at the office.
Some work their odd waitress/waiter/cashier jobs in hopes the right recruiting agency will find their file long lost in the piles and call them finally for a modelling shoot or audition, and be on their beginning adventure of being the hot thing everyone could only dream of having or becoming.
Jokingly we also have the Alberta dream: work the rigs, finance a truck, marry a stripper. The metaphor is ever present here in local society’s social ladder climb, with people chasing to break the 6-figure income mark in an oil and gas job, financing a nice truck, and waving their money to attract a beautiful blonde housewife. In the industry you see many broken examples of those who’ve failed, especially midst the oil recession: the bitter and lonely trapped in their jobs away from home and in the cold just making ends meet by meeting their debt payments, and would do anything for a woman, only to find the market for love competitive, and hard-earned money and time only barely enough to satisfy the thirsting women. The unemployed fallen lose their women, toys, homes, dreams, and more- some so defeated financially and mentally to never return again.
In discussions with friends and colleagues, I too have been convinced multiple times:
get out while you still can.
But what does it mean to get out? To some, it means to accept failure. To others, it means alternative. And to the determined, to never give up. But where do you draw the line between determination and strategic retreat?
