An exercise in trading anecdotes isn't going to get anyone anywhere. The fact that the people you've surrounded yourself are relatively well off does not offset problems surrounding unemployment and falling wages.

I got the impression that GPs point was that the American Dream is about improving ones own fate (especially when the environment is hard) rather than complaining about unemployment and wages.

I think of the American Dream as more structural: the idea that, unlike in countries with strong, hereditary class systems, anyone could succeed in the U.S. with effort, because your success was less tied to your pedigree. Imo, statistics, rather than anecdotes, are a good way of determining the extent to which that's still true.

Great. Then obviously we should make life even harder for the masses so they can achieve even more glory from overcoming the even more overwhelming odds. And if they fail, they deserve what's coming to them!

/sarcasm

We're not "well-off" by any stretch. We're happy, we're motivated, but we're all sitting on respective powderkegs of fiscal disaster. I'm uninsured--one slip in the bathroom and I'm bankrupt. We live in a house because we can split rent and utilities super cheaply and it lets us live next to where we like working.

I'll be the first one there with you waving signs about unemployment problems and falling wages--do you have any idea how annoying it can be to get livable rates in my area? Where are you from sir (or madam)?

My point was that some notion of the "American Dream" is far from dead or ailing--it's merely changed to something less materialistic.

EDIT: praptak nailed it.

This is getting rather silly. Ask any immigrant what "the American dream" is. Take an average of their responses and you'd have a reasonable approximation of the American dream. Nobody in their right minds would redefine the American dream to be 5 uninsured happy motivated apartment sharing guys one bathroom slip away from bankruptcy changing the world with their precious github commits. I lived 5 years in the texas heartland... nobody I know meets that definition. People are living paycheck to paycheck ans there is genuine concern that the American dream has passed them by.

Yes this is trading an anecdote. It is also sharing his own experience and perspective. And his hopes and dreams.

Which differ from the journalist's take. The American Dream not so much fading as changing.

Reciting the same grim statistics about unemployment and falling wages yet again is what "isn't going to get anyone anywhere." But this sort of conversation? Quite the opposite.

The OP article is mostly anecdotes, too. And the author picks the hardest hit industries when he provides statistics.

Everything you wrote reinforces the article.

That's nice. A lot of my former college friends are on food stamps, and workaholism is no dream of mine.

I hope things work out for your friends--stamps are a good temporary measure while you get back on your feet, and if they're good folks I'm sure that'll happen in no time. :)

As far as workaholism goes--cliched though it may be, the saying "If you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life" is something I've found to be quite true.

It's true, but unhelpful. Until they're all replaced by robots and thrown out into the cold entirely as useless, unemployed bums, someone has to clean the toilets, stack the shelves, assemble the iPods, deliver the chemical supplies from one lab to another, etc. I can't abide the notion of simply condemning some fixed portion of society to suffer because the rest of us are too stingy to pay them a living wage, nor a majority of society to suffer because a combination of a deflationary demand crisis and rising automation have rendered their labors permanently obsolete.

EDIT: Speaking for myself personally, I quite like being a grad-student and researcher, but I really felt that programming in the corporate world was... just not for me. I'm actually pretty far up the skill chain and provably (ie: I've done it before) capable of bringing in a good deal more than a subsistence wage for myself, but that still doesn't mean I love the thing that makes me the most money or gives me the most sustainable career path.

(Last Sunday I spent two hours powersnaking out a clogged commercial sewer line, so believe me that I have sympathy for shit jobs.)

I completely agree with you both that we shouldn't condemn people to work annoying jobs and that we shouldn't be corporate drones (regardless of pay).

I think that the key to fixing a lot of this is to have it easier to move around and find interesting work--if I get sick of writing code, I should be able to find a gig doing plumbing, or carpentry, or stacking, or whatnot, until I'm ready to code again.

I think that the problem we're dancing around as a society is that physical jobs are not selected-for by the market as much as they once were (due to either automation or foreign labor), and professional jobs are a few JSON blobs and sorting algorithms away from being deprecated.

We need to figure out how to deal with an educated, intelligent, and most importantly easily-bored citizenry. It's no longer enough to say "Well, everybody has to work jobs they hate, so suck it up!". If we can't solve around that, well, we're in trouble.

You nailed it. Dont buy the hype