Time and money. What is the American dream, and how does it differ from the Russian

Boris Lokshin, cultural critic

Do not believe when they tell you that you need to revive the "American Dream" (American Dream).

It cannot be revived, because there has never been any special American dream. Or rather, so. Throughout the twentieth century, we were told that the American dream is about working hard and painfully at a boring job all your life, buying yourself a house, having three children, sending them to college, paying off a mortgage (bank loans, - editor's note), retire, move into a plastic building in Florida and die quietly in a decent nursing home. But this is not a dream. This is a normal way of living of the middle class. There are, by the way, others. And yes, this has been getting more and more difficult lately. But that's not what people dream about at all.

The American dream is a dream to earn a lot of money, and as quickly as possible. And it is no different from the Russian dream, the Chinese dream and, in general, the dreams of any poor person with a minimally developed imagination. Another thing is that in the twentieth century in America there were the most favorable conditions for its implementation.  And now there are many competing centers. But Silicon Valley remains Silicon Valley, and someone is still lucky.

The American Dream was invented in the twentieth century by politicians and journalists as an alternative to totalitarian collectivist ideologies.  Nazism, communism, that's all. But these ideologies no longer exist, and without them, the alternative has lost all meaning. It's all left behind, dead.  What to do? Follow Rozanov's precepts: "if it's summer, peel berries and make jam; if it's winter, drink tea with this jam". Rozanov himself, however, in the last year of his life did not have anything like jam with tea, and there was no food left at all. But the possibility of such an outcome does not depend on us, and it is better not to think about it.