Minecraft: The Shadow of the American Dream
You know, I really can’t remember when I started playing Minecraft. I feel like it wasn’t very long ago, but I have no idea. All I know is that I had been hearing about it for a very long time before I finally broke down and bought it for my PC. At first, I struggled to see the point of it. It took time to figure out, and there was no clear purpose to it — just whatever purpose you gave yourself. There are almost no stakes to the base game in survival mode, other than surviving, and even that is more about holding onto your possessions. The very first extended game of Minecraft I ever played, I just made a little farm by a river. My game now is… a little farm by a lake I made in the sky.
As an elder millennial, there are certain things I was told as a child: work hard, you will be rewarded; don’t give up on your dreams, and you will achieve them; that happiness can be found with tenacity (clarification: I am white and was socialized feminine, so there are some privileges and draw-backs which complicate these statements). It didn’t really take long for me to realize that these statements were mostly bullshit. But, as I get older, I am constantly disillusioned at the mistruths of these promises. I have worked very hard, and my partner brings in an amount that I would have thought was what rich people made when I was poor in my early twenties. Still, our hope of buying a house feels nearly delusional. Sadly, that isn’t all that is out of reach.
I went to college with the “don’t give up on your dreams” mentality, and worked harder than I thought possible to do. My dream has always been shrouded in self-doubt so, at first, I dared only to hope I would graduate at all. Then, I got some accolades and began to believe in myself a bit. Then, I hoped to be in the honors program, and when that was achieved, I started really believing I could do something more. Before I was in my Senior year, I had my sights set on graduate school. I had honestly believed that I wasn’t remarkably smart until I went to college, so when I found out that the opposite was true, I spouted the “don’t give up” mentality. Then, one weird afternoon, college was over. I chased my dreams like they were my last hope for survival, and I truly feel that they are. But, they didn’t pan out the way I needed them to. With enough money, you can buy an approximation of an achieved dream — which brings me to Minecraft.
The strange sense of dumb accomplishment you get with playing Minecraft cannot be overstated. In my current game, I have built a metropolis. I basically built up a village I found with a few villagers and houses to a sprawling city with nerly 100 houses, and districts that I have named. I am sort of the mayor, and everyone works together to trade and live in relative harmony. If something happens, I take care of it while my populace goes about their daily lives. I have built myself 4 houses, one for each area, since it takes about half of a in-game day to go to circumnavigate the city. I spend my time just building more houses, watching the children run around, and doing basic farming tasks. And I feel like I’ve done something any day that I made this home better, more beautiful, or created something. What a dystopia.
Can I even say the level to which I feel like I have no input in the way the world is going? I am sweating profusely as the world gets hotter; I am struggling to pay bills for the cheap-ass AC unit in a renovated 70’s condo we can barely afford; I am working toward getting a decent job so that I can pay my student loans because jobs won’t take me due to my lack of experience — so I have to take whatever job I can. I took a survey about how life after graduating has been. Not successful is an understatement. I am watching AI take what few writing jobs there are by people who actually just want a free workforce so everything they get is profit for a billionaire. I am watching as the world argues about climate change (while we all know that we need action now, and the only reason there isn’t action is because of the lack of profit in it). I have to take whatever house we can afford after we’ve been priced out of our hometown, and our adopted city. I can’t do anything at all to change any of it right now. So, I just have to toughen up and make it through this never-ending trauma.
I want to go back to Minecraft now, where I have a community, not people with phones tied to their faces trying to find any high at all to get them through this capitalist hellscape. Sure, my Minecraft friends are, by and large, monosyllabic, non-gendered caricatures of tradespeople, but their work is rewarded with a simple life. Wandering traders don’t dictate our days in my little world. I can create anything I feel like making, and it is mine to enjoy. I don’t have SEO quotas or need to worry at all about content value. My kids literally spent weeks building a giant, wool turkey only to light it on fire. I don’t have to be needlessly cruel to get ahead. I work hard, and my hard work is rewarded. I can bring to life anything I can imagine there. And happiness doesn’t need to be met with intense resistance, you could seriously just start a game right now and do whatever you wish you were doing beside working yourself to death. If that isn’t the new American dream, I don’t know what is.
