American Dream Scientifically Impossible

According to a major nueroscientist, the pursuit of the American Dream through securing our own chunk of the pie is actually not going to make us any happier in the long run. The consumer society is a beast doomed to fatten and depress itself. Our very genetics make the quest for the American Dream a quixotic disaster. Screening for a replacement should begin immediately.

from Wired:

"We've been taught, especially in America, that happiness will be at the end of some sort of material road, where we have lots and lots of things that we want," said Whybrow, a 2008 PopTech Fellow and author of American Mania: When More Is Not Enough. "We've set up all sorts of tricks to delude ourselves into thinking that it's fine to get what you want immediately."

And if we aren't seeing the effects of immediate gratification on a national level now, then I dread to see what happens when the real consequences of a superpower Id nation take hold. It's not all doom and gloom for the shattered American Dream, though. There are ways to work our way out from the false land of plenty.

"America has always believed that it was the perfect society. When you have that mythology driving your culture, it's hard to look around and say, 'Is someone else doing it better than us?'" said Whybrow. "But you can trace the situation we're in to our evolutionary origins. Now that we find ourselves in the middle of this pseudo-abundance, we're in trouble. And the fantasy that we can restart the American dream just isn't true."