The Cost of Pursing a Dream...
By: Jackson Toney
The cost of pursuing a dream is...
Love; love towards another person, love from society, and love of yourself.
Sacrificing Love Towards Another Person
Before Daisy married Tom, Daisy fell in love with Jay Gatsby, who was stationed at the base near her home. Though she chose to marry Tom after Gatsby left for the war, Daisy drank herself into numbness the night before her wedding, after she received a letter from Gatsby and admits she doesn't want to be with Tom , “Tell ’em all Daisy’s change’ her mine. Say: ‘Daisy’s change’ her mine!’” (Fitzgerald 72). She marries Tom the next day fully aware that her social and economic status will always be among the filthy rich because of her future husbands financial status "Next day at five o’clock she married Tom Buchanan without so much as a shiver, and started off on a three months’ trip to the South Seas. I saw them in Santa Barbara when they came back, and I thought I’d never seen a girl so mad about her husband" (Fitzgerald 73). Daisy sacrificed real love to be with a man that could spoil her with goods. In the movie/book "Wolf on Wall Street" a movie that shows how a man that became rich from selling stocks gave up his first love with his wife. Like Daisy in "The Great Gatsby" he found a new lifestyle, a more wealthy one that he chose over her and ended up cheating and divorcing his wife all to pursue the dream of being a part of a higher class.
Sacrificing Love From Society
During the documentary, Inside Job, innocent people were cheated in order to make more money for CEOs and bank investors. Bank investors such as Goldman Sachs, took advantage of people who were only trying to manage their own money. The bankers and CEOs sacrificed the love from their clients for their selfish materialistic greed towards money without regard to what it does to the people and the nation. In comparison is the article "Wall Streets' Great Recession Costs Us All 30 Trillion", the people that were affected by the recession were those that trusted to put there money in a good, safe place. "While the U.S. government turned a tidy profit on the Citi deal, earning almost $15.5 billion from it, the financial damage inflicted on the nation and its citizens is both staggering and historic -- but not in a good way" (O'Connell 3). CEOs gave up the love of their clients to pursue their dream of earning a great profit. Although it worked for them, it put the rest of the nation in a massive crisis.
Sacrificing Love of Yourself
The story of Jordan Belfort as shown in the movie/book "Wolf on Wall Street" is one that demonstrates how the dream of being rich changed him and his love for himself in a way of respect. After serving time in prison, he is now a motivational speaker where he has no regrets on his life decisions and tells the world on how to pursue the dream if wealth, "You have to unlearn all the thoughts and morals that you were built upon that were making you poor and replace them with new thoughts—rich thoughts" (Belfort). Belfort gave up and is telling other people to give up and forget who they are and thing bigger and richer. In comparison is the article "Serving in Florida" where Barbara Ehrenreich is looking for a job and explains that she will not be a waitress but to pursue her dream of money and being able to pay her rent she ends up giving up who she was and losing love for herself. She gave up her love and respect for herself and became a waitress to have the opportunity to achieve her goal/dream.
Citations
Ferguson, Charles H, Audrey Marrs, Chad Beck, Adam Bolt, Matt Damon, Paul A. Volcker, George Soros, Eliot Spitzer, Barney Frank, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Svetlana Cvetko, Kalyanee Mam, and Alex Heffes. Inside Job. Culver City, Calif: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2011.
Novellino, Teresa. "Entrepreneurial Lessons from the Real Wolf of Wall Street." Upstart. N.p., 17 Dec. 2013. Web. 7 Jan. 2014.
O'Connell, Brian. "Wall Streets' Great Recession Cost Us All $30 Trillion." The Street. The Street, 12 Sept. 2013. Web. 07 Jan. 2014.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. "Barbara Ehrenreich - Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Jan. 2014.
Wolf On Wall Street. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Perf. Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill. Red Granite Pictures, 2013. Film.