What Would It Be Like to REALLY Live the American Dream?
Have you ever thought about what it would be like to live with unlimited wealth, power, and sexual partners and still hold the highest reputation among your peers?
Have you ever thought about what it would be like to live with unlimited wealth, power, and sexual partners and still hold the highest reputation among your peers?
These are the four pillars of the “American Dream.” They represent the life everyone wants, but few can ever have. It’s the embodiment of James Bond meets Alice Walton meets Bradley Cooper meets Mother Teresa. For the person that holds all four of these pleasures in check, they:
- Never walk into a room as the second most powerful person
- Always command people’s attention whenever they speak
- Enjoy going to bed every night with their sexual fantasies fulfilled
- Garner the respect of even their wisest colleagues
It’s a life of total control, passion, ability, and influence. Such a life is almost unfathomable and reads like the script of a poorly developed TV show. Few live like this because, in real life, one or more of these four legs are always missing from the table.
Despite Super Bowl commercials that promise we can have it all, deep down, each of us realizes how improbable a life like this is. There are natural desires, lusts for power, and areas of passion we harbor that will forever go unrealized. It’s the separation between internal fantasy and realistic expectations.
But picture with me for one moment what your world might look like if all your lusts became reality. What if your desires for fame, fortune, and power came true? How would you live? What would you do? Where would you live? And whom would you live life with?
These are the questions one person had the chance to answer.
The Preacher Who Had It All
The preacher of Ecclesiastes (possibly King Solomon) had the opportunity to write his own story with almost no restraints. His was a tale of two realities. If ever there was one who could grab hold of all the fruits of pleasure life had to offer and squeeze every last drop of juicy excitement, it was him.
He was the poster child for what the American Dream would become. Ecclesiastes tells us he had everything at his disposal. Gardens, ponds, livestock, servants, riches, and sexual partners were just a few of the many luxuries the preacher experienced.
In Ecclesiastes 2:9-10 the preacher makes this casual, humble brag and observes that he became great and surpassed all before him in Jerusalem. “Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them,” he remarked, “I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil.”[1]
He was what we might call a modern-day playboy.
But despite his tremendous wealth and success, the preacher makes this astonishing remark in Ecclesiastes 2:11: “Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.”
In a bizarre contradiction of epic proportions, the very man who arguably gave the greatest speech on the meaningless of life came from the lips of the man who had it all. That’s some raw stuff, and it’s what most people focus on when they look at the book of Ecclesiastes.
