The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

At what point exactly did human beings start to have ambitions? You only need to go back a measly ten thousand years to the time when we were still hunter-gatherers, and the question "what do you want to be when you grow up?" was non-existent. You weren't going to be anything else than what you were, and as far as what you were going to do when you grew up, you were either going to track and kill animals or pick leaves and berries. Somewhere along the line, and it may have been only six or seven thousand years ago, it became possible to dream of

success at something for which you were entirely unsuited. For every Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes born to an 18th century peasant family countless inept wannabes struggled unsuccessfully with paints and canvas, producing mud. And that brings us to today, and the reductio ad absurdum of reaching for the moon, American Idol, where tens of thousands of hopeless are encouraged to hope, and from the hapless hordes one new contestant for celebrity bowling is crowned.