Is the American Dream Dead or Just Different?

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For nearly a century, the world has looked to the American Dream as the pinnacle of “making it.” A symbol not just of wealth, but of possibility itself. The promise that through talent, effort, and a fair shot, life could be better, richer, and fuller for anyone willing to work for it.

That phrasing, “better, richer, and fuller” comes from historian James Truslow Adams, who coined the term American Dream in The Epic of America (1931). He described “a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.” In essence, it was capitalism distilled.

But when Adams wrote those words, America was in the depths of the Great Depression. Within two decades the Dream he described would fuse with material symbols and cause Baby Boomers to clamber to new heights in their career. From higher rates of education to two-income households coupled with the perfect suburban home, cars, steady jobs with the promise of a never-ending corporate ladder. Of course, the white-picket-fence, 2.2 kids, and a dog named Spot.

The American Dream Becoming a Reality

The American Dream didn’t simply just emerge out of words penned in 1931, it was built through a perfect convergence of cultural confidence, economic momentum, and technological change that defined mid-century America. Using my R.E.S.P.E.C.T. framework of generational momentum, we see nearly every pillar being accelerated during the birthing of the American Dream.

In the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, the country entered a stretch of moral and material alignment. Church membership hovered around 70% of U.S. adults from the late 1930s through the 1960s, the highest sustained level on record (Gallup, 2020). That shared religious and civic language reinforced a simple story: work hard, live decently, build a better life for your family.

The economic engine made that story believable. From 1948 to 1972, labor productivity in the business sector grew by about 2.8% per year, and real median family income roughly doubled over that period (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2023). Workers could see output and living standards rising together. There is something satisfying about seeing the level of work you put in translating to cash in your account (or under your mattress).

Industrial capacity that had produced tanks and bombers pivoted to cars, appliances, and televisions; pent-up wartime demand turned into a consumer boom (History.com Editors, 2023). Not only did consumer goods surge, but the place to keep all of those new goods also became more accessible—the home. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (1933) and Federal Housing Administration (1934) standardized long-term fixed-rate mortgages, and postwar programs extended credit to millions of Americans. By 1960, the homeownership rate had jumped from 43.6% in 1940 to 61.9%, a historic surge (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2020).

Infrastructure multiplied the effect. The 1956 Interstate Highway Act funded about 41,000 miles of highways with substantial federal support, reshaping development around the automobile and opening cheaper land for suburban housing (Federal Highway Administration, 2021; National Archives and Records Administration [NARA], 2023). New roads plus new mortgages made the single-family home with a yard, driveway, and commute feel both normal and attainable.

By 1960, about 57% of U.S. households had at least one vehicle, with multi-car ownership quickly rising (Bureau of Transportation Statistics [BTS], 2022). Television further stitched the narrative together. In 1950 only about 9% of households had a TV. By 1959–1960, roughly 85%–90% did (U.S. Federal Reserve Board, 2022; Library of Congress Research Guides, 2021). In just a decade, TVs accelerated past the tipping point and became the norm. Night after night, Americans saw versions of the same script with stable jobs, suburban homes, and upwardly mobile families, broadcast as an achievable norm.

Demographically, the Baby Boom (1946–1964) pushed fertility to around 3.5 children per woman in the early 1960s, cementing the nuclear family as the cultural baseline (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2023). At the same time, the basis of gender and family was beginning to shift. In 1960, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) formally approved Enovid as the first oral contraceptive pill, giving women unprecedented control over if and when to have children (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2010; Liao & Tiefer, 2000; Associated Press, 2020). That decision quietly expanded who could access education, careers, and a self-directed version of the Dream.

Technology nudged the workforce in the same direction. With the arrival of commercial computers like UNIVAC I in 1951, the economy started its long transition from factory floors to offices and service work (Computer History Museum, 2021). By the early 1970s, service-providing industries employed more workers than goods-producing industries. At the same time, a college education became more standardized and was held by about 11% of adults by 1970, up from 5% in 1940. It had become a recognized pathway into the emerging white-collar economy (BLS, 2023; U.S. Census Bureau, 2022).

Put together, this period formed a perfect storm for the birth of the Dream: widely shared values, rapid productivity growth, broad income gains, expanding homeownership, mass media reinforcing a common life script, and new technologies opening new professional pathways. For a large share of Americans, especially white Baby Boomers, a steady job, a mortgage, and a rising standard of living were not abstract ideals; they were statistically normal outcomes.

This is the version of the American Dream that lodged in our collective imagination, the same Dream later generations were told to expect, and the one many now suspect no longer exists.

The 2020s: Gen Z’s Reality Check

Here’s the paradox: by most economic measures, young adults today are not falling behind, they’re simply chasing a different kind of dream. And it’s no longer solely an American Dream.

Psychologist Jean Twenge points out in her book, Generations (2023) that Millennials and early Gen Z adults have largely caught up to previous generations in both income and employment at the same age. Real median earnings for 25- to 34-year-olds now mirror those of Gen X when they were young, and household wealth for adults under 40 has climbed sharply in recent years (Twenge, 2023). According to the Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts, adults under 40 held about 30% more total wealth in 2024 than in 2019, aided by gains in equities and other investments (Federal Reserve, 2024). The familiar story that “young people are poorer than their parents” doesn’t hold up to the data.

What has shifted is what wealth and success mean. For Boomers, the Dream was a stable career, opportunity to climb, accumulating that perfect house (with a mortgage), and an idealistic nuclear family rooted in community. For Gen Z, it’s flexibility, mobility, and experience.

One could argue that housing has become unaffordable, and that is the leading reason Gen Z and Millennials have delayed or altogether forgone buying houses. But I reject that as the sole reason. While housing prices have certainly climbed, the median home-price-to-income ratio has risen from about 3× in 2000 to more than 6× in 2024, That’s only part of the story (National Association of Realtors, 2024). Many young adults aren’t chasing the suburban starter home their parents prized. They’re choosing to rent longer in cities close to culture, cuisine, and creativity, or to live transiently while working remotely. Their version of success isn’t just upward, it’s geographic and global.

Fertility has fallen to 1.6 children per woman (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2024), and marriage ages continue to climb. The power to control family timing, first granted by the pill in the 1960s, has evolved into the freedom to design life on one’s own schedule and in line with one’s identity. Gen Z wants to live life first and settle later.

And the geography of aspiration has changed. The “good old days” of a bustling American Main Street in suburbia, coupled with a perfectly manicured lawn, no longer define success. The modern Dream is digital and borderless. Their social world is global. Their currency is experience. They ask not what they can do for their community, but what the world can offer them as individual members of a connected planet.

Their wealth is measured less in possessions and more in possibilities.

Do Americans Still Believe in the American Dream?

Do Americans still believe in the American Dream or is it dead? It depends who you ask, and more importantly, what you mean.

For most of the last century, the American Dream was a defining piece of our national identity. It was how we sold ourselves to the world: work hard, play fair, build a better life for your kids than the one your parents built for you. The media exported that story globally. Immigrants arrived chasing it. So, when you stop to look at how American’s respond to surveys about the Dream, there’s something a little sobering about how fragmented that belief has become.

When ABC News/Ipsos asked in 2024 if the classic formula “if you work hard, you’ll get ahead” still holds true, only 27% of Americans said yes (ABC News/Ipsos, 2024). That’s the meritocracy version of the Dream, and confidence there has collapsed.

But in Pew’s 2024 survey, when the question shifts to whether “the American Dream” is still possible at all, a narrow majority, 53%, say yes, while 41% say it once was but is not anymore (Pew Research Center, 2024). Same country, different wording, different story.

Then you look at the Archbridge Institute’s 2025 American Dream Snapshot, which asks people to define the Dream for themselves. Nearly 69% or respondents say they have either achieved the Dream or are on their way to doing so. And, when they describe it, they don’t lead with money. The top markers are freedom of choice in how to live (83%) and a good family life (80%). Only 15% say becoming wealthy is essential (Archbridge Institute, 2025). The Dream hasn’t disappeared, it has changed shape.

We’ve shifted from a shared, merit-based national project to a personalized freedom project. Boomers could say, “I’m working to build something for my kids, my family name, my country.” Gen Z is more likely to say, “I’m working so I can live how I want, where I want, on my terms. And, everyone should have that same right.” It’s less “we are building America” and more “I am finding a place for myself in the world.”

So is the American Dream dead? Under its old definition, a confident, collective faith in hard work reliably producing upward mobility, Americans have drifted. Under its emerging definition with maximized autonomy, self-expression, and the right to choose your own path, it’s very much alive. The tension between those two stories is exactly why the data looks contradictory, and why this question is so hard, and so important, to answer.

Closing Thoughts

The white picket fences and suburban lawns that once framed the American Dream have been replaced by curated feeds and digital footprints. The Main Street storefronts that anchored small-town ambition now compete with global platforms and borderless opportunity.

Now, one quick aside. I’ve focused almost solely on Baby Boomers and Gen Z intentionally in this essay, not because Gen X, Millennials, or Gen Alpha are missing from the story, but because the American Dream was born and accelerated with Boomers and redefined and globalized with Gen Z. One generation built it through shared prosperity and progress—a better tomorrow for all who worked hard. It was a true meritocracy. Now, Gen Z is reshaping the dream to align with their ideas of freedom, identity, and the individual.

What we’re witnessing is the death of the Dream as we once knew it. We are see a transition of its core values from collectivism to individualism. Instead of a generation with a core driver of economic success and achievement framed in the growth of a powerful nation, we see a generation moving to finding their own unique and individual place in the world.

The shared idealism that once built neighborhoods and a nation is giving way to a generation building identities and networks that are borderless, digital, and global. The conversations that once centered on building a better company or community now stretch toward building a better world where each person can be who they want to be.

If, as leaders, we fail to see the shift happening in front of us, we risk naively leading a generation pursuing freedoms far different than those James Truslow Adams once imagined: “better, richer, and fuller.” Instead, the youngest generations are clambering after something far more personal: identity, self, and how their existence fits into a global society.

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