“Time” off of The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd is one of my favorite songs of all time. I first listened to the album on a late night with my dad. “Time” immediately jumped out as my favorite song, and it’s stayed that way since. On its own, it isn’t connected to the American Dream lyrically, and Pink Floyd isn’t an American band either. However, I felt I found a lot of parallels to this song’s lyrics and my own life/life’s journey. It’s about a very common human experience, after all.
Though we always hear that we should make the most of every day, it’s very rare that we waste no time in a day. Humans are stuck in the present, so wasting away one day doesn’t seem like a big deal. These wasted days slowly add up, “and then one day you find [that] ten years have got behind you / No one told you when to run / You missed the starting gun”. In my case, ten years is a little bit extreme, but when I finished high school, I felt like it had passed much more quickly then I expected.
“And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking / Racing around to come up behind you again”. Listening to this song felt like a rude awakening. I know that I’m still young and (hopefully) have plenty of time left in my life, but it felt like if I didn’t make changes in my life as soon as possible, I would end up much further behind than I needed to be.
That’s where the American Dream comes in for me. This song singlehandedly inspired me to stop thinking about my dreams and start actually working towards them. I had spent a lot of time in high school thinking about my future and what I wanted to do, but spent almost no time thinking about how I would actually get there.