Only fools have great dreams?
The degree of optimism you have in your life is the reason why some people dream of the simple life and others dream of great deeds, fame and fortunes. Whilst we all have hopes and desires, there is spectrum between what is achievable and mere pipe dreams. What is uncertain is which are the fools and who are the ones who are disheartened, battered down by life, those that change the world and who have lost their rationality. I can also offer no advice on what is the better path, is it better to be delusional happy or realistically depressed, to have too much ambition or not enough to get out of bed in the morning. However dreams do come true, maybe not in the way you wish, or without unintended consequences but there is always hope.
If you lived in the dark ages and told your priest that you had a dream where people were equal and had enough to eat without working from dawn to dust, you would have been burnt at the stake as a witch and people would have agree that such dangerous thoughts was a danger that the village should be protect from. In a stable, unchanging world, where everyone knew their place, be it, peasant, craftsman or lord, any threat to the order could kill, if peasant started philosophizing, no one would tend the field and everyone would starve to death, dreams could kill. There were only bad alternatives to the strict order of the times, at the extreme there were outlaws, warriors and priesthood, though even these were ordered in their way, they were violent and power driven routes (even priests, they were quite murdery in those days), that came with great risks, though it did give a small degree of freedom that attracted those who were willing to risk their lives for their dreams.
The modern world in contrast has a lot more freedom, you get to chose your route within a limited range of options depending upon your personal circumstances and potential. Someone might have a dream of being a professional baseball player, singer, writer but not everyone gets to be one (or at least one who is paid and given status), however we all have something where we have a comparative advantage over others, even if it is that we are willing to do the jobs that no one else wants to do. Sadly this is not the kind of advantage that people enjoy having, being the people who is willing to clean up after others does not give you the status that is desired by so many, though if you recast your personal worth in terms of supporting your family, it can give you the satisfaction of a job well done.
It is the complicity of the our world that makes the pursuit of our great dreams so difficult and in many ways more difficult to fulfill, if you want to bring about world peace, which is a good goal by any standards, you immediately run into the problem that it is too big for one person to try and solve, even for one generation to solve. There has been moments of hope, when the Berlin wall came down, South Africa became a democracy and there was a domino effect of political freedoms across the world, there was a genuine moment in history, when things started to look like the world could become a peaceful place, where we lived together without violence between countries and political group. It has been a period of great sadness since, as set backs came with increasing regularity, that hope has been lost or put back to a later date. If your happiness is dependent upon world peace breaking out, you may have a long wait until you get to smile again.
The alternative is to go small, to live a simple live with reliable sources of micro-happiness, to enjoy your cup of coffee with mindfulness, to have less but better relationships, satisfying work that produce measurable results. A carpenter spend a day building a set of drawers and know at the end of it, that they have done something, it might not change the world but it does give someone a beautiful place to store their clothes, and it should not be under-estimated how satisfying this can be, especially if they are paid a fair wage and given the status that they deserve for their work. It is a different story for someone in the developing world who does the same thing but has to sleep on the floor of their workshop and does not have enough money to feed their family. So even the simple live needs the conditions around it that gives that life meaning.
Living the simple life is only meaningful when it is set in the context of rejecting the complexity of the modern world, not when it is the only choice out of a lot of bad options. When it is a skillful and elegant choice, made in part as a response to the insanity of eighty hour work weeks that pay for expensive lifestyles that lack meaning or progress, that are only concerned with status, holistic adaption where we work to pay for things that we do not want or value but must have because our peers are playing the same game, going on the same exclusive holidays, driving the same over-engineered cars with the same labels of our status on them.
However simple is not the answer when you all have the same simple things and no hope of having more, that is just the dark age in a modern dress, we all have the drive to be different, to be better (not necessary better than others, just better than we were). It is how we have progress, that desire for the world to be improved and be a better place for our children and everyone else at the same time, we want a rising tide that improves our health and happiness, and ideally we want to be the source of that improvement, because we all want the recognition of our work and contribution. However how we achieve that in a world where things keep on getting more complicated, is a moving target that is impossible to see, let alone hit.
Which show how hard it is to have dreams in such a world, when you are not even sure what they should or could be, you could train to be the greatest architect that ever lived, and face the prospect that all design work will be outsourced to artificial intelligence in twenty years times, which would make your dream worthless. We face an uncertain, fast changing world and dreams could become irrelevant to the world economy within our lifetimes, we might just have to follow the program set out by virtual assistant and teacher, and our measure of success we be measured by our progress bar, and if that is the case I can guarantee that people will rebel, not because life is bad under the domination of the logarithmic but because people will always seek to be better, to have dreams even if they are only the dreams of a fool.
That is the beauty of completing interests it creates an inherently diverse world, where the interests of an individual might be different from the group, and different groups have different interests. One person's fool will be another's genius and guru, what you have to decide is which kind of fool you wish to be and pursue it with the knowledge that you are almost certainly a fool who is making do with limited information and most definitely be wrong about something if not everything, and you act anyway because you the other option is to do nothing and that is the kind of sadness that is impossible to live with. That is the kind of tolerance I want in the world, where we mind our own business out of an understanding that we are all fools, so find your poison, choose your path and head into it with compassion for all the other fools doing the same with the good intention that hope will guide us all to a good place, or at least better one than today.
What this looks like in terms of action is different for everyone and depends on your life circumstances, it is certainly worth examining your small actions and hopes, start making your hopes come true for those small moment. When they start happening, make sure that you appreciate them in the moment, life is made of the small things, and they can past so quickly, so enjoy your coffee, you only get so many. Then expand upwards to bigger dreams, whatever work you find in front of you, do it with joy and hope that it will lead somewhere, fulfill a small one then move onto a medium sized ones and then if you are lucky you might find a big one that you have the skills to do something about, be flexible in your dreams and hope, and the big dream might just find you because you have done the groundwork for it to thrive. So be the biggest fool that you can, even if no-one else finds you funny, at least you will make yourself smile and that is the kind of fool I like spending time with, one who has big foolish dreams.
