Domesticky

The American Dream. A white picket fence, a two-car garage, a mortgage, and a 401(k). A system where anyone can make it if they just work hard enough. It’s a beautiful idea, a comforting bedtime story.

But like George Carlin said, “You have to be asleep to believe it.” Asleep to what, exactly?

Asleep to the Rigged Game

The American Dream runs on the fumes of a rigged system. The house always wins. The economic ladder that promises upward mobility is missing half its rungs, and those who make it to the top are busy pulling them up behind them.

Wages stagnate while corporate profits soar. The price of entry – education, healthcare, housing – has skyrocketed, and yet, they keep telling you to hustle harder, to pull yourself up by those mythical bootstraps.

Spoiler alert: the boots were never yours to begin with.

Asleep to the Illusion of Meritocracy

We love the idea that effort equals reward. That the best and brightest will rise.

But look around: wealth is inherited, connections matter more than competence, and entire industries are built on nepotism.

The American Dream is a well-packaged myth that keeps people grinding, believing that their next break is just around the corner, while those in power rewrite the rules to keep the gates firmly shut.

Asleep to the Debt Trap

Education is supposed to be the great equalizer. Yet, in the U.S., it’s more like a financial prison sentence. A degree doesn’t guarantee a job, but it does guarantee a lifetime of student loan payments.

Want to own a home? Welcome to 30 years of debt. Need medical care? Hope you enjoy crowdfunding your survival on GoFundMe. The system isn’t broken; it’s designed to keep you in debt, obedient, and too exhausted to fight back.

Asleep to the Cult of Work

In America, exhaustion is a badge of honour. The glorification of overwork – 50, 60, 70-hour weeks – is sold as ambition, when in reality, it’s a life-draining necessity for survival.

Paid time off? Barely. Maternity leave? A joke. Retirement? Maybe, if you’re lucky.

Work until you drop and then hope you saved enough to afford being old. The American Dream is a hamster wheel, and stepping off it feels like failure instead of freedom.

Asleep to the Illusion of Freedom

Freedom is a funny thing when your choices are dictated by economic survival. When healthcare is tied to employment. When your neighbourhood determines your quality of education. When billionaires buy political influence while the average person is drowning in rent hikes and medical bills. They sell you the idea of freedom while quietly stripping away your options.

Asleep to American Imperialism

Where do you think all your cheap goods come from? Why can you buy a T-shirt for the price of a coffee?

Why does the U.S. live in relative material comfort while entire countries struggle with poverty and instability?

Because the American Dream doesn’t just exploit its own people – it exports that exploitation worldwide.

The cheap products on American shelves come at a high cost somewhere else: sweatshops, environmental destruction, resource extraction, and the endless cycle of economic colonialism disguised as ‘aid’ or ‘foreign investment’.

America’s standard of living is propped up by a global supply chain that thrives on keeping wages low and working conditions miserable in the developing world.

And when countries try to break free from this system, what happens?

Sanctions. Coups. Military interventions. The U.S. economy depends on keeping other nations weak, dependent, and obedient. Yet, most Americans remain blissfully unaware, believing poverty in other countries is a result of laziness or corruption rather than decades of calculated geopolitical manoeuvering.

The dream is built on the backs of those who will never wake up from the nightmare.

Asleep to the War on Wokeness

But here’s the kicker. When people do start waking up, the system fights back.

And nothing terrifies the keepers of the American Dream more than people who refuse to play along.

Enter “woke,” a term once meant to describe awareness of systemic injustice, now repurposed as a boogeyman, a convenient scapegoat for everything supposedly wrong with modern society.

The very people who want you to believe in the dream are the ones who scream the loudest about “wokeness.” Why? Because an awake, questioning, and critical public threatens their carefully constructed illusion.

If you’re paying attention to wealth inequality, climate change, racism, labour exploitation – if you’re daring to question who benefits from the current system – then you’re a problem.

So they spin the narrative: woke is weakness, woke is radical, woke is un-American.

They frame it as an attack on tradition, on family, on freedom.

But in reality, being “woke” simply means refusing to stay asleep.

And while they want you to believe the greatest threat to your way of life is some university student talking about pronouns, the real enemies – the billionaires gutting your economy, the corporations poisoning your water, the politicians selling your future – laugh from their boardrooms, knowing you’re too distracted to notice.

Waking Up

So what happens when you stop dreaming? When you open your eyes and see the system for what it is? That’s when the real work begins. The work of rejecting the lie, of demanding something better. Community over competition. Labour movements that fight for livable wages. Mutual aid networks that bypass the broken safety nets.

A redefinition of success – one that isn’t about accumulation but about sustainability, equity, and actual quality of life.

The American Dream isn’t dead. It was never real to begin with. But waking up? That’s the first step toward something better.