American Dream Definition Essay

As Emerson once said, "America means opportunity, freedom, and power." This is probably what many immigrants thought when they came to the USA in order to persue the American dream. To many of those people, that translated into something that would impact then for the rest of their lives. These people sacrificed their jobs, their relationships and connections, their educational levals, and their language at their homelands to start their new life in America and succeed in reaching their dream. So what is the defination of the American dream? Some think of it just as being rich and famous or to have a lot of power. However, my personal definition of the American dream, is the ability to have freedom, being able to get the highest level of education, being successful in finding a honorable job, to have a healthy and happy family, and eventually to have an affordable place to call my own. In otherwords, it's very hard to know when and if you will ever reach it. To
many it's not attainable. There are people that have the job of there dreams but are forced to give up happieness. Then there are people that dream about things that have no possibility of coming true. Finally, there are the people that sadly have no talent to reach there goals in life. When one takes a look at Oprah Winfrey, they could say that she has accomplished an abundance of admirable deeds, and they be compleatly right.
With the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Acadamy in South Africa and the many times she has helped the guests on her talk show, she is seen as an insperation for much of the country. People will look to her and think that if she is doing all that, then she must me living the American dream, but there are people that look at the things that are missing in her life, such as a husband and children, and say that she is successful but has yet to reach the American dream. In the book, The Great Gatsby, the character 'Daisy Buchanan' got the things in life that mattered most to her but was never able to really be happy. She had an amazing house, beautiful daughter, and was well known in the community, but she never loved the the man she married. This shows that just because you have all the 'things' you could ever want in life, doesn't mean your automatically
happy. Another reason why people don't always succeed at fullfilling their dream is just because its unrealistic. Some people dream of one day becoming the president of the United States of America and there is not a very high chance of reaching that goal. The character 'Jay Gatsby' from the book The Great Gatsby was never able to attain his American dream. He wanted to have Daisy in his life and in the end he couldn't get her. She was already married ans she refused to get married to someone without money. Jay worked very hard to get his money and the status that he had but even then, it wasn't good enough for her. In addition to the unreal dreams that some people have, which are causing them to fail overall, they could just have a lack of talent they need to get that dream job. An exaple of this is the hundreds of twenty some-things that try out for the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. Some of the women work their whole life to reach the goal and others give it a year or two to practice to get ready to compeat against some of the best dancers in the area. Many people don't make the cut but come back for next season's tryouts. They think that all the work that they do during the break is going to be enough to get them a spot, and for the lucky ones it works exactly how they plan it but once again there are many girls that are let down to know that they wern't good enough. The people that were cut just don't have the natural talent that most of the girls on the team have. Emerson's idea of opportunity, freedom, and power is what many immigrants hoped to achieve when coming to america. This was there idea of the American dream. That dream has changed into somthing that is not attainable to people in today's socity. People that have all the 'things' in life that they could ever hope for usually miss out on actually being an overall happy person, some people just dream too big, and others lack natural talent. People should always think of something that could really happen. After all, we do live in the real world.