Repost: The American Dream Makes You Alone

As quoted from Chuck Palahniuk in Stranger than Fiction

If you haven’t already noticed, all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people.

In a way, that is the opposite of the American Dream: to get so rich you can rise above the rabble, all those people on the freeway or, worse, the bus. No, the dream is a big house, off alone somewhere. A penthouse, like Howard Hughes. Or a mountaintop castle, like William Randolph Hearst. Some lovely isolated nest were you can invite only the rabble you like. An environment you can control, free from conflict and pain. Where you rule.

Whether it’s a ranch in Montana or a basement apartment with ten thousand DVDs and high-speed Internet access, it never fails. We get there, and we’re alone. And we’re lonely.

After we’re miserable enough– like the narrator in his Fight Club condo, or the narrator isolated by her own beatiful face in Invisible Monsters– we destroy our lovely nest and force ourselves back into the larger world.