Hi there, I’m Brie! I’m a product marketing consultant and portfolio career coach. I write about business, technology, and culture and our changing relationship with work. Follow along for more musings about the future of work and what not!
My husband and I spent the Fourth of July weekend in Portland, visiting family and friends we hadn't seen since moving to Seattle. It felt like a bit of a wake, if I am honest, vs an actual holiday. Every person we caught up with—save for our cousins who work in state government—had either lost their job, was afraid of losing it, or was recovering from recent unemployment. And the passage of what politicians euphemistically call the "One Big Beautiful Bill" seemed to sucked the remaining air out of the party.
There's something profoundly disorienting about celebrating national ideals while watching the people around you struggle with basic economic security. The contrast felt particularly stark on a holiday dedicated to our origins—a day when believing in American exceptionalism requires this kind of willful suspension of disbelief we usually reserve for children's fairy tales and Santa Clause.
So what happens when the American Dream feels like a cruel joke?
The conversation around the kitchen tables and backyard barbecues I attended this weekend wasn't about gratitude for our freedoms. It was about fear: fear of medical bankruptcy, fear of our aging infrastructure, fear of a future that feels increasingly precarious for everyone except those born into wealth or lucky enough to secure one of a perceived dwindling number of stable job positions.
Yet the policies that could address these fears enjoy broad popular support. Universal healthcare polls consistently well across party lines. Americans want their tax dollars spent on roads and bridges rather than endless foreign interventions. We believe in helping those hit by difficult circumstances and recognize that individual success depends on collective investment in education, infrastructure, and opportunity.
The disconnect isn't between what Americans want and what America needs. It's between what we want and how we are marketed solutions to these problem that ultimately divide us as if we don’t want the same future.
The American Dream has always been part promise and part mythology.
That promise being: that hard work would be rewarded with security, that each generation would do better than the last, that opportunity would be available to those willing to pursue it. The mythology was that this happened through individual effort alone—that success was a personal achievement rather than the product of collective investment in education, infrastructure, and institutions.
Today, both the promise and the mythology are failing Americans. Hard work no longer guarantees security. Many young people face the prospect of being worse off than their parents. And the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” narrative rings hollow when the cost of housing, healthcare, and education have far outpaced wages for decades.
But perhaps, in spite of this heavy reality, this failure of this long held mythology creates space for something better: a vision of prosperity that doesn't require us to marginalize some for the benefit the few or pretend we're all rugged individualists capable of making it on our own.
What if we built a society around the radical idea that individual success and collective wellbeing aren't competing interests but complementary ones? What if we designed our economy and our politics around the understanding that healthcare, infrastructure, economic security, and environmental protection aren't luxuries but the foundation for human flourishing?
I don’t believe this to be a utopian fantasy. I see it as a practical recognition that we already know how to solve most of our problems. We have the resources, the technology, and the knowledge. What we lack is the political will to prioritize collective wellbeing over individual wealth accumulation at the top.
The question isn't whether community care and a thriving middle class are achievable. The question is why we've convinced ourselves they're undesirable.
The work ahead isn't just political—it's also imaginative. We need new stories about what we owe each other, what prosperity looks like, and how we define the good life. Stories that center care over competition, abundance over scarcity, and our fundamental interdependence over the myth of rugged individualism.
This means moving beyond the tired debate between government and markets to ask deeper questions: What kind of society do we want to be? What would it look like to organize our economy around human needs rather than profit maximization? How do we create systems that allow everyone to thrive rather than forcing most people to struggle so a few can accumulate vast wealth?
These aren't partisan questions. They're human questions that transcend traditional political categories. They require us to think beyond the false choices we've been offered and imagine alternatives that serve the common good.
The disillusionment I felt this Fourth of July wasn't despair; it was clarity. That the old history lore we share every 4th isn't resonating, the promises of progress ring hollow, and the American mythology is crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions.
But seeing these contradictions for what they are creates opportunity. When the existing system fails to deliver on its promises, space opens for something new.
We can choose to dream different dreams.
The people I talked to this weekend aren't looking to tear down everything that exists. They're looking for a future that benefits everyone. They want healthcare that doesn't bankrupt them, infrastructure that doesn't crumble beneath their feet, and an economy that rewards their work with security and some sense of pride.
That's not too much to ask.
It's the bare minimum of what a functioning society should provide its citizens.
The question is whether we're willing to do the hard work of building it—not just through politics, but through the daily practice of caring for each other in ways that make it impossible to pretend we're not all in this together.
Because at the end of the day, we ARE all in this together. And pretending otherwise isn't working for anyone except those who profit from our disconnection.
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