The Case For Living Your Dreams

A different perspective on why someone should do everything they can to live the life of their dreams came to me unexpectedly the other day, as all ideas do.

Consideration of the past, present, and future state of our world, each provide their own motivating factors for why someone living today should go after the life they truly want to live.

Today, I look to the first of the three - The Past.

We take for granted all that is our world today. Born in 1995, I myself can hardly remember a time when the internet was not the dominant force that made the world go round. Whereas kids in high school today aspire to be content creators and influencers, those professions didn’t exist when I started high school in 2010.

But even that view is an incredibly narrow one. If we zoom out all the way, we can see that current science approximates the existence of us, homo sapiens, to be about 300,000 years old.

Now let’s look at pivotal events in more recent history that have shaped our world.

The advent of Christianity two thousand years ago, was the emergence of the fabric of society we all live in today (Westerners, at least). Let’s call it 100 A.D.

The beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid 18th century marked the most significant shift in human existence up until the Technological Revolution. Let’s call that time 1760.

In 100 A.D., about 90% of the population of the Roman Empire worked on farms.

In 1760, about 85% of the population in what is today the United States of America, and Europe, worked on farms.

For 99%+ of human history, the vast majority of people worked to survive - that is what farming is after all.

The idea of “chasing your dreams” has always been a super-minority position. The majority follows the societal push and their fellow man.

Technological innovation aside, my grandfather (what a man he was, my word) was less likely to chase his dreams than my father (a character as well), and my father less likely than I.

Part of the story is also wealth. Accounting for inflation, the total wealth of the world in 1950 was $13 trillion, while in 2025 it is $500 trillion.

Whether you were born with that wealth or not, it’s out there, and more accessible than ever before.

In sum, we are all disposed to look out into our world and see the negatives. Financially, socially, environmentally, spiritually - we look to the past and lament the present state of the world. I myself wish to have been born in England as the son of a wealthy family in Victorian times, but alas…

We play the cards we’re dealt. This is our time, whether we like it or not.

As with anything, there is good and bad. The two most obvious goods of our time are our awareness of how much better equipped we are to create our realities than our ancestors, and equally, the sense of responsibility we should have to create those realities in light of our favor.

We didn’t get to choose when or where we were born, but we get to choose how we live.

Undeniably, more than ever before.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

- George Santayana

Sincerely,

Jacob

P.S. I leave for a ten week stretch of travel on Tuesday, starting in a true dream country of mine - INDIA!