I think there are very few people in this world who are effectively born into or arrive at their dreams without any friction. In fact, I think most people don’t end up chasing their dreams, much less living it. Most children come from homes where the parents have settled to a certain capacity and probably encourages their children to pursue relatively safe paths to get on in this world. There’s nothing wrong with that. But what if that safe path isn’t what you really want? In a recent Huberman podcast, a guest speaker poignantly made the observation that the desire to chase your dreams, if suppressed, does not do away within a person’s life, but instead manifests in more sinister ways such as addition, abuse of others, and abuse to self.
Chasing one’s dream is another way of saying taking profound risks associated with one’s career and perhaps personal life. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in the arts, but for some people (me I guess) it is. Back to the title. I think for the majority of us who were not born on the path to chasing our dreams, getting there will require battling through a sea of rejections and dejections. I think it takes a certain type of resilience and persistence to get through a process like that. And it definitely takes known or having a very clear sense of what it is that one wants to persist.
I also think that most people do not chase their dreams because most people simply don’t really have a desire to reach for anything beyond the mundaneness of day-to-day living. I think many are not necessarily content with the lives that they inhabit, but are not willing to undergo the state of discomfort associated with making the difficult decision of traveling against the current.
Ultimately, it’s an interesting question that is relatively pertinent as I begin to research alternate careers in the creative space. It’s certainly a path that few biomedical engineering doctorates would take. It’s unconventional and doesn’t make the most financial sense (I would probably make more in the MRI field); yet, it’s a path that I cannot help but fixate on because it aligns with my personal values and interests.
And that’s the other question I wanted to address with this post. We as humans are in fact herd creatures, but at what point do we sacrifice who we really are for membership access to a particular group? It’s medically true that having a social life is in fact the healthiest option for our brains, but being at the mercy of constant scrutiny and judgment, conscious or subconscious, is a dangerous thing in terms of wanting to forge a personal identify.
I think this is one of those situations where you can’t have it both ways and that there are pros and cons to both.
The Ivory Tower 
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