※ 아래 스크립트는 발표자의 발표내용을 그대로 표기하였으므로 구어체 표현이 포함되어있고,
As someone on the cusp of her 20’s, I can’t tell you how sick I am of being asked what I want to become or where I see myself 10 years from now. Like, come on, I’m a college student, I’ve only consumed frozen pizza the past week and haven’t washed my hair in three days—you really can’t expect me to tell you where I’m planning on going to grad school, eventually launching a career and meeting a mediocre but dependable spouse to settle down in the suburbs and have two kids with.
I’m just exaggerating, but I think dream fatigue is a real thing. Dream fatigue. How can that be? Dreaming is supposed to feel like you’re bathing in ethereal clouds, not sitting in a harshly-lit interview room being bombarded with your own anxieties about a murky future. At my university, even freshmen are compelled to apply to dozens of internships for their first college summer. It’s the definition of a first-world problem; a private college campus where kids are scampering for career opportunities, constantly feeling like a failure despite being overachievers, each and every one of them.
The world does not ask us what our dreams are. It interrogates us. The ruthless price-tagging of time, the notion that you have to be productive, or you’re just throwing time in the furnace. The expectation for entry-level job applicants to already have experience. No wonder we are tired of being asked to dream, when it feels like we are constantly being demanded to dream, and only those with a tangible, practical benefit. Dream fatigue happens when you find yourself unable to focus on the present because of the perpetual pressure to have a dream and ruthlessly attack it.
The side effect of dream fatigue is that you look around, and everyone else is just as stressed about finding a direction and moving forward, that you decide this is normal. This is simply how youth are supposed to feel now. Worse yet, maybe you should be stressing out a little more. Maybe you’re just not dreaming hard enough; the kid next door is dreaming more intensely, more vigorously, and he probably knows exactly what to say when he’s sitting in a job interview and he’s asked where he wants to be 10 years from now. We are locked into an urban, contemporary, first-world nightmare, where the roar of competitive society does nothing but drown our sense of individuality and peace. The feeling that we are enough, and that everything will be okay. Our cities keep getting richer, and yet the youth are never happier.
It’s a Catch-22. I either feel like I’m falling behind or that I’m wasting my youth away by being a workhorse.
I’ve spent the past couple years actively training myself to combat the dream fatigue mindset. That means I catch myself worrying about what I’m going to fill my time with over break, and instead tell myself that it’s okay to simply take a break. It means I catch myself filtering my own dreams to be more practical, and instead let my visions run free and without consequence. It means I hesitate whenever I’m asked what I want to do after graduation, and recognize that it’s fine to not have an answer.
I can’t tell you what I want to be like 10 years from now. My ideal state of being is to know that I could be anything. Soul-crushing corporate woman in heels? Experimental writer-actor-healer-hippie? Tangerine farmer in Jeju-do? Isn’t it so beautiful to not know?
The only thing I do know is that I’ll be on the cusp of my 30’s. I know I want future-me to be asked where I want to be 10 years from now, and I want to be just as clueless as I am today. That’s all I want. It may not feel like an ethereal cloud, but it’ll feel like the ground. The earth and air. The feeling that my blood is still circulating, and that I am not stagnant, my path is not fixed—it’s never been. And maybe I’ll still have purple hair and eight piercings and so much love as I stare into the vast unknown, into my 40’s and 50’s and 60’s, and I’ll step forward without anxiety, but with contentment.