The American Dream. The shimmering promise that dangles before every person daring enough to reach for it. The land of opportunity, where hard work leads to prosperity, where success is there for the taking. But what they don’t tell you—what they never tell you—is that this dream comes at a cost. And whether you’re dead or alive, it will take everything you have. Everything you are.

It doesn’t care about your limitations. It doesn’t care about your struggles, your fears, your exhaustion. The Dream demands sacrifice. It whispers that you can have everything—but only if you’re willing to give everything. Your time, your energy, your soul. If you want a seat at the table, you better be prepared to leave parts of yourself behind, scattered like breadcrumbs on the path to success.

You wake up at dawn, grind through hours of work, and come home drained. The dream tells you that’s not enough. Work harder. Hustle longer. Sleep less. Chase it with everything you’ve got. And if you collapse, if you stumble, if you break under the weight of it all, well, that’s just the price of ambition. There’s no sympathy here. No pause button. Just the relentless march forward.

And the most insidious part? The Dream doesn’t just take from the living. It takes from the dead, too. If you fall before you reach the finish line, someone else will pick up where you left off, using whatever you’ve built, whatever you’ve lost, to fuel their own journey. Your legacy becomes raw material. Your failures become cautionary tales. Even in death, your worth is measured by how much you left behind, how close you came to touching the golden prize.

This system is ruthless. It doesn’t care about you—it cares about what you can produce, what you can achieve. The Dream isn’t a gentle promise; it’s a relentless demand. It’s the voice in your head that says you’re never doing enough, that success is always just out of reach. And if you dare to stop, to rest, to say, “This is enough,” the world rolls on without you, leaving you behind in the dust, forgotten.

The truth is, the American Dream doesn’t make you whole. It takes pieces of you and promises to make something better with them. But in the end, it leaves you hollow. A shell worn thin by the constant pursuit of more. And for those who never reach it, for those who fall short, the Dream has no mercy. It offers no consolation. You either win, or you disappear.

Yet still, we chase it. Because the alternative—giving up—is unthinkable. To stop running, to stop sacrificing, feels like failure. Because the system has convinced us that our worth is tied to the chase. That our identity is forged in struggle. And so we give and give, hoping that someday, maybe, the Dream will finally give something back.

But the Dream never stops taking. It takes your youth, your health, your peace of mind. And even when you’re gone, it’ll still be there, looming over the next generation, demanding their sacrifice, too.

So, dead or alive, the American Dream will drain you dry. Because it doesn’t care who you are. It only cares what you can be made into. Fuel. Labor. Legacy. And when you’ve given everything, it will move on to the next soul brave—or foolish—enough to believe in it.

The Dream is beautiful, but it’s hungry. And it always collects its due.