Dreams I Had

When you were in your 20s and 30s, what did you dream of doing—and why weren’t those dreams realized? Here are four of the daydreams I had, but which remained just that:

Buy a sports car and drive across the country. This one got nixed by a host of factors—not enough vacation time, lack of money, the arrival of my first child at age 25. But truth be told, what seemed like a fun adventure slowly lost its allure, as I imagined long hours on the road.

Purchase and edit a small town newspaper. I got my start in journalism at age 19, working for a tiny newspaper in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. In the years that followed, even as I worked for major publications, I mused about the possibility of running my own paper. If it had become a real possibility, I suspect I’d have quickly realized I couldn’t afford my dream, given the need to save for retirement and to put two kids through college. Still, this daydream sort of came true. I may not be running a small town newspaper, but I have had the chance to run my own publication, thanks to HumbleDollar.

Explore the U.S. in an RV. This dream never got very far. Yes, I spent time scouring the internet for different types of RV. But I was always put off by the idea of driving the darn thing. Even small RVs seemed uncomfortably large. And burned into my memory is a scene from Fort Worth, where I was attending a conference. I watched as a couple tried to navigate the city’s streets in their RV. I don’t know whether they were stressed, but I sure was, and I was just a bystander.

Buy a beach house. This particular dream came a little later, in my early 40s. My favorite town on the New Jersey shore is Ocean Grove. I’d often stop there for lunch and a walk, and every so often I’d bicycle the 42 miles from my home in central New Jersey to Ocean Grove. In 2007, as property prices tumbled, I toyed with purchasing a small home or an apartment, and even checked out a handful of properties. But all of them seemed either overpriced or too rundown. In this case, my dilly-dallying proved fortuitous. Ocean Grove got badly roughed up by 2012’s Hurricane Sandy.

So, what dreams did you let slip away?