Why I Travel: Disillusioned With the American Dream
Standing in front of my tiny closet stuffed with clothing, shoes, and accessories, often jamming its sliding glass doors, I wondered how I could believe I had nothing to wear for my date. At that moment, the endless Instagram reels featuring Kardashian lookalikes in exclusive outfits that contorted what remained of their waists into disproportionate shapes flooded my thoughts. I became overwhelmed by conflicting feelings of insufficiency and a desire to feel I was enough regardless of what I chose to wear.
This memory still saddens me but no longer ensnarls me in feelings of unworthiness, only remedied with more things, better titles, and more prominent ways of showing up. It serves as the source of a continuous curiosity. That moment was the impetus for exploring whether it is possible to have everything and only precisely what I need. How could I fill my cup and the weight of it be pleasantly light, easy for me to carry no matter where I was in the world and who I chose to be?
According to my immigrant parents, filling one’s cup should never be easy, and neither is carrying it. We live to bear a burden because it is all we have; for that, it should be worth something. To them, that burden we carry is the physical, emotional, and spiritual toil from the pursuit of happiness, defined as possessing all-encompassing wealth.
The rebel in me, with whom they became all too familiar, sought to point out their contradicting beliefs. They shared stories about our people finding peace in living off the land, clashing with an ambition of coveting it only to erect homes we couldn’t fully occupy.
As much as I want to blame their way of thinking and their hopes that I would someday carry their burden and mine, I refused to fall into the trap of cyclical, generational wars. The youth are often blamed for issues caused by precedent behaviors or inactions, and the elders are blamed for expecting the youth to carry a burden of nebulous worth. This whirlwind of unwieldy pain once appeared very different, spirals down into the earth, and begins to feel the same.
Particularly in an immigrant household, there is nothing like the painful disappointment from the awareness that a dream is just that — a dream. If my parents’ pain is the same as mine, what more do I need to carry? I can only be responsible for myself, and I hope that if I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams, their hope for me is never to have to carry a burden.
This supposed dream, despite being impossible to attain or something not everyone is allowed to have, is one we’re all expected to aspire to, to cling to anyway. Like a toxic relationship, we begin to fixate on the potential, the hope that something would hold in our chase of a mirage. And just as we’re becoming disillusioned with empty promises, we’re made to believe that if we do or possess more of something, we might finally be worthy of recognition. But being in love with the American Dream is like suffocating beneath the emotional weight of a narcissist disguising themselves as true love while simultaneously devouring one’s hopes.
Whenever I travel, I often wonder whether it is an act of running away from something or towards realization. Whatever one would call it, I always hope it frees me from the expectations that I continue to run toward the American Dream; a now revealed nightmare is what my parents unknowingly wish for me and my family abroad mistake as a pathway to happiness.
My most authentic experience of happiness is when I’m away somewhere and surrounded by nature. Ironically, freeing oneself of the asymmetric institutional contract we’re born into requires relying on systems created by the same Devil who formed the terms. And so I work, no longer with the hope to continue reaching outward, but with a hope to break away and reach inward.
