Impulse

An urban dweller hauls his wife out to a farm to live the sim­ple life, then can’t under­stand why he’s mis­er­able and loos­ing money. Farm Eye for the Farm Guy, a seg­ment of This American Life I ran across recently, is a great para­ble that liv­ing your dream requires hard work and won’t nec­es­sar­ily pay the bills.

The episode is a fun one: Hillary, a news pho­tog­ra­pher from New York, decides that he wants the rural life of a farmer. He buys a farm and moves to the coun­try with his fash­ion designer wife hop­ing to make a new life grow­ing and sell­ing pro­duce. Five years later, the farm is a mess and they’ve run out of money. So, the clever folks at TAL decide to give the guy an agri­cul­tural makeover and bring in an expert on farm­ing.
The result­ing dis­cus­sion is hilar­i­ous and fas­ci­nat­ing. Hillary is not inter­ested in doing all the phys­i­cal labor required to farm and is full of men­tal jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for his inac­tions (he has to exer­cise each day before he can do phys­i­cal work, you see…). When the Farm Guy makes sug­ges­tions for improve­ments, Hillary instantly dis­misses the ideas with objec­tions that seem rea­son­able on the sur­face, but taken together seem like excuses for avoid­ing the work. Essentially, he lives on a farm, but doesn’t actu­ally farm.
What struck me most was how delu­sional Hillary sounded. He clearly had an image in his mind, his dream, and ignored any real evi­dence that dis­agreed with that dream — like the amount of phys­i­cal labor required, the time to build a farm, his wife’s frus­tra­tion, or the fact that almost no farm­ers in America earn their entire liv­ing by farm­ing. He was blind to all this — blinded by an idyll. He lived his life inside that dream in his mind rather than mak­ing it a real­ity.
I’ve seen delu­sion like Hillary’s in myself and in oth­ers. It’s easy to make some grand ges­ture like buy­ing a farm or resign­ing a decade long career in com­put­ers (um, er, ahem). It’s easy to spend time think­ing about the dream; read­ing up on oth­ers who do sim­i­lar things. It’s easy to enlist in a work group to make you feel like you’re work­ing on your dream. But, none of those things make your dream live. You still have to do the act itself: Your dream becomes real when you put down the how-to books and actu­ally make some­thing; when you actu­ally bring work into that work group; when you’ve spent two years actu­ally doing your dream every day. Hugh MacLeod talks about this in his excel­lent online book How to Be Creative.
Of course, like Hillary, you have to ask your­self — does the actual work inter­est me? If not, it’s time to sell the farm and move back to the city.
I don’t want to get too down on dreams. We need dreams. Dreams are pow­er­ful. Dreams moti­vate. We need dreams to get us started and to keep us going when we’re prac­tic­ing the same damn song over and over again. But we must always remem­ber that the dream is merely that — a dream; a detailed desire. It is not the end of the road; it’s the fuel you put in your car.