Pennsylvania — I’ve always been a big dreamer – imagining the places I’ll go and the person I’ll become. But that was before a global pandemic hit.
In Spring of 2020, I remember staring at a TIME magazine with an ominous headline: “The Great Reckoning: More Americans are unemployed than at any time since the Depression.”
Nearly two years later, that headline still haunts me. I see it in the news articles that flood my feed and in my friends — freshly graduated with neither experience nor job prospects.
The only exception has been jobs in technology. From Zoom school to online ordering, these pandemic adaptations holler over and over again that technology is king. And that perhaps I should play it safe and release my own aspirations of pursuing journalism — perhaps dreaming is a luxury I can’t afford during these times.
However, no matter how prominent worries about job stability become, we must keep fighting for our ability to dream. Because if I’ve learned anything during these unprecedented times, it’s that a world without dreamers is a world without spirit or purpose.