Sitting here in a local coffee shop, it is 8:37 AM. While I look out the window observing the flurry of activity as people scramble to join in the Monday morning rat race, presumably to jobs most of them do not enjoy or hate, I sit here with my laptop. With my laptop submitting resumes and looking at job descriptions – a strange eagerness to rejoin them in that very same race. Why do we do what we do? Generally I suppose it is the method by which we have to survive… to pay our mortgages, to feed and raise our families, to chase after the proverbial “American Dream”. A dream that seems even more distant for a larger segment of our society as wages have not kept up with the rising cost of living the last 40 years.
Is that dream really our own wishes, or a concept that has been marketed to us, that we have been programmed to encapsulate as our own? The wishes of the pernicious CCC – Commercialism, Corporatism and Capitalism. In my 20 years of chasing that Dream, changing jobs for higher pay, more skills and prestige – I’ve ended up here. Here in a coffee shop in a suburban enclave with cookie-cutter architecture and landscaping that could be any suburb outside of any major US city – nothing discernible to distinguish it – firing off resumes to rejoin the chase of that dream.
Maybe it is more resourceful to use this time for reflection and observation. To put things in perspective. To realize that once I rejoin the race the purpose has to be larger than me, my material desires, the ability to treat my wife and kids with expensive vacations – separate from the reality that many kids their age deal with in inner cities and rural outposts. How will use my skills, my attributes, my talents to help others and positively influence other lives? Maybe that is why I’m here this morning, in this coffee shop, typing this blog. Possibly nearing the end of a three month hiatus from the race, the perspective I need to endure the next leg.
Chronicles in the Black 
I agree with your perspective completely. I would add that we are being sold the trappings of the American Dream all neatly wrapped in a golden bow care of the 3cs. The rat race is a distraction created to keep the super wealthy im their lane and us running to never acheive that level of wealth which we have very slim chances of acheiving. Along the way we are being sold the idea that we are not complete unless your wife has a big diamond, you have a big house, maybe even a vacation house or 2, multiple cars, lavish vacations and holiday spemding that seems to escalate yearly. These expectations are well placed marketing meant to extract as much of our well earned money from our pockets as possible. It is not only the professional athelete that feels the preasure of their “precieved” station in life..but we the common man can be sucked into the notion that more is better and spending is the american way. Detox from many of these practices are necessary as we all try to find our true selves and the meaning of life.
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