You Used to Want More Than This

What Adulthood Does to Ambition

There was a time when bedtime meant something. Not just sleep, but the whole ritual of it: eyes closed, mind already somewhere else, somewhere enormous. Children dream without permission. They dream of becoming astronauts, presidents, world-famous chefs, the first person to do something nobody has done before. The ambition is almost aggressive in its certainty. Nobody tells a seven-year-old to be realistic, and somehow they know to ignore it anyway.

Then something happens. It doesn't happen all at once, which is the sneaky part. Nobody wakes up one morning and consciously decides to stop dreaming. The shift is gradual, so gradual it's almost polite about it.

Blame adulthood, or at least what passes for it. Somewhere between the first rejection letter and the third utility bill, the calculus of aspiration changes. The brain, which once ran wild inventing futures, starts running a different kind of math. Risk versus stability. Passion versus practicality. That enormous thing becomes a smaller thing, then a reasonable thing, and then eventually just a vague memory of a thing.

Psychologists have a term for this: "identity foreclosure," a concept James Marcia introduced in a landmark 1966 study, which describes the process by which people commit to roles and life paths without ever fully exploring alternatives. Most people don't arrive at their adult lives through bold decision-making. They fall into them. And once you're in, the falling feels a lot like choosing.

Sleep science complicates this further. Newborns spend roughly 50 percent of their sleep in REM, the stage most associated with vivid, narrative dreaming. That percentage drops sharply through infancy and early childhood, and by school age, children's REM sleep has already settled near the adult range of 20 to 25 percent. So even literally, biologically, the most intense dreaming happens at the very beginning of life, long before children are old enough to remember it.

But the neuroscience only explains the vehicle. It doesn't explain why so many people seem almost relieved to give the dream up. There's a particular kind of exhaustion that sets in when hope costs too much to maintain. Dreaming big without a reasonable shot at big is its own form of cruelty, and most people figure this out by their mid-twenties. The dream doesn't die, exactly. It gets filed away somewhere next to the yearbook photos and the guitar that hasn't been tuned since 2011.

Grief researchers, including those working in the tradition of Pauline Boss's concept of "ambiguous loss," have pointed out that the hardest losses to mourn are the ones without a clear ending. You can't hold a funeral for a dream you technically still have. So it sits, untouched, neither buried nor alive, while real life fills in around it like concrete.

And yet. People do come back to them, sometimes decades later, sometimes out of nowhere. The 40-year-old who goes back to school, the 55-year-old who finally starts the business. Not because they got more naive, but because at some point the math shifted again, and the dream looked cheaper than the regret.

Turns out the dream didn't go anywhere. It was just waiting to see if you were serious.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

Copyright © 2026 Maria Santos Salinas for FRONTeras.

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