So why do we keep telling ourselves that we’re still seeking the same California dream? “California dream” has become a verbal tic in speeches, a graffiti we scrawl on signs and headlines, without thinking about its meaning. Democrats and Republicans alike, as they assumed new offices this month, pledged to defend the supposedly enduring California dream. In his inaugural address, Gov. Jerry Brown even suggested that the aspirations of today’s California were much the same as those of his 19th century California ancestors.

It’s time to stop this nonsense. Ceaselessly paying lip service to that old California dream—of this state as a great destination for people from around the world, as a gateway to rapidly acquired wealth and good health for the middle class, as a magnet of youth offering the best and cheapest education, as the capital of leisure, as a place of open land and sprawling suburbs—perpetuates a false picture of what the state has become. And that makes it harder to come up with new dreams and aspirations that fit today’s California.

To be fair, the old California dream was once powerful. The historian H.W. Brands has shown that the California dream “of instant wealth, won in a twinkling by audacity and good luck,” replaced the old American dream—a dreary and modest Puritan deal—after the Gold Rush. And that dream had some basis in reality. From its beginnings, California was a place with some of the highest wages in the world. Our abundant and talented workforce used those wages to educate their children and dream up all kinds of inventions, from mining equipment to the Internet.

But the dream was mostly myth. Many Californians got ahead here because of exploitation of labor—miners benefited from the forced labor of natives, the Irish from the boycott of the Chinese, and my Dust Bowl Okie forebears advanced out of orange groves when Mexicans were brought in to do the hardest work. And the waves of California growth that Brown recounted in his speech—railroad and silver booms, citrus and fruit in the 1880s, oil and auto in the early 20th century, aircraft before and during World War II, aerospace in the post-war era—were also bubbles that popped and did real damage to many lives. The dream’s real impact was to keep drawing people here from other states and countries; the energy, labor, and sheer numbers of new arrivals made this a fast-growing place.

It’s time to awaken from that old dream and look in the mirror. We are a great place—I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else—but we are not the same state we keep saying we are.

We are no longer that great destination for people dreaming of a new life. A majority of us are now native-born Californians. We have many immigrants, but few are new arrivals. The younger, working-class people who once flocked to California are leaving. And so we are not as young as we think we are—the birth rate is below replacement, and the number of children in the state declined by nearly 200,000 in the past decade.

And for all our millionaires and billionaires, California is defined not by easy leisure, but by hard work and struggle. Our unemployment rate is higher than the national average. We have the country’s highest poverty rate, according to measures that take into account cost of living and the value of government assistance.

Getting a piece of California has never been harder. Education costs have risen more quickly here than elsewhere. More than half of the nation’s 50 most expensive real estate markets are in California. Home ownership is falling.

We’re even losing our diversity advantage—Houston is now a more diverse city, racially and ethnically, than Los Angeles. For all our dreams of open space and inviting suburbs, we are more urban, and more defined by our cities, than ever. No other state has three cities as great as San Francisco, San Diego, and L.A., and our inland metropolises are giants in their own right: Fresno has more residents than the cities of Atlanta or Miami.

What is the dream of this new California? It’s tempting to dodge the question, and note that a state this big has many different dreams. After all, here is a list of just some of the musicians who have recorded the song “California Dreamin’”: the Beach Boys, America, R.E.M., Jose Feliciano, The Carpenters, Baby Huey & the Babysitters, the Four Tops, Bobby Womack, Queen Latifah, The Seekers, George Benson, Eddie Hazel, Raquel Welch, Alvin and the Chipmunks, MIA, the Italian project Colorado, the Russian rock band Mumiy Troll, Meat Loaf, and Diana Krall. You know the version from the California lottery ads? That was sung by a Belgian women’s choir.

But the truth is there is a new California dream, one that might seem modest but is quite grand when you consider all the difficulties of being a Californian these days.

The dream, put simply, is to be able to stick it out here. California is a struggle, so we dream of a good struggle, of finding our footing, of figuring out some way to beat the statistics and buy a house and pay the mortgage and educate our kids. We dream of treading water, which isn’t so bad—the water here is usually warm.

The dream of sticking it out can be seen in the narratives that drive our politics. Many of us worship the god of sustainability; we’ve poured most of our big-picture futurism into efforts to save the state’s environment and the planet, from new alternative fuels and solar to driverless cars. It’s telling that when people talk about dreamers in California today, they’re talking about unauthorized immigrants whose dream is to be able to stick around.

This new dream is also why opposition to taxation remains strong in such a liberal place. It already costs so much to live here, so why add new taxes and make it harder to stick around? We’re also reluctant to make big investments in infrastructure and people. Instead of working to transform the lives of working-class people, we prefer narrow policies to make their struggle a little less burdensome, maybe at $15 per hour. And our most foolish actions—throwing subsidies at the rich people who run Twitter and Hollywood and pro sports teams—come from the fear that high-profile institutions won’t stick around, but will instead pick up and move elsewhere.

The new dream of sticking around is also, of course, a dream about growing old. The elderly population of California is expected to double in the next generation. Many of us dream of being able to retire here, and of having kids who can afford to stick around themselves so we can see our grandkids.

That’s a very different dream than the old one. It’s about continuity, not rapid change; about attachment, not finding your own space; about California not as a place to which you can escape, but as place where you can belong. We Californians dream today of nothing less and little more than being able to stay here, so that we might keep dreaming in this wonderful and difficult state.

The post California Is No Longer a Destination appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Over the past two years, Mathews has written Zócalo’s “Connecting California” column, which appears in 30 media outlets across the state. He’s asked people in all corners of California for their ideas and dreams—and used their answers to offer such an assessment to a large crowd at Grand Central Market.

The iconic California dream was of rapidly acquired middle-class wealth, said Mathews—and it is “older than the American dream, which is a slightly poorer cousin of the California dream.” The American dream was a Puritan dream of modest wealth, accumulated year by year; according to historian H. W. Brands, the California dream—following the Gold Rush—was one “‘of instant wealth, won in a twinkling by audacity and good luck.’”

This dream was based partially in reality: Late-19th-century California offered high living standards and high wages, and California has a history of excellent public education and innovation. But the dream was also part “nonsense,” said Mathews. You couldn’t just grab a piece of property and be set for life. Profit and exploitation, boom and bust, have always come hand-in-hand here.

So what is a more realistic dream in today’s California?

“We are not a land of leisure,” said Mathews. California is a center of industry, technology, and work. This state is the opposite of its reputation for flakiness; scholars have found that California is one of the top places in the country for worker productivity. And the state attracts more venture capital in some years than the rest of the U.S. combined. California pays more in federal taxes, and gets back less in federal benefits, than virtually every other state. “The next time someone from out of state calls Californians flakes,” said Mathews, “you tell them that we’re the ones subsidizing your flakiness.”

California is also a state of high poverty rates and middle-class struggle, with more than half of the nation’s 50 most expensive real estate markets. California no longer attracts the young, poor, and ambitious, said Mathews—those people are leaving for other states.

California is no longer a magnet for immigrants, either. The state’s immigrants are settled rather than being recent arrivals. Today, a majority of Californians are native-born. This means Californians are becoming more like one another—and as a result, “we are, dare I say, less sexy than we used to be,” said Mathews.

Yet each California city and region still maintains a character separate from the rest of the state; it’s difficult to figure out what connects us to one another. The economy of the southern San Joaquin Valley, with its oil and gas production, seems a lot like Texas; economically, the Bay Area has more in common with Seoul and Boston than it does with Riverside.

So how does one sum up all these regions and diverse communities?

Mathews said that all of California’s major regions today are less a permanent destination or escape for people from around the world—and more often a crossroads. People come to California to live and work and go to school for a while, then they return home or head somewhere else.

“We are no longer a state of arrival,” said Mathews—and so “the dream is no longer to show up and do well.” Rather, it’s “to be able to find a way to stick it out here.” Paradise, in today’s California, is more like Survivor, where everyone is scheming a way to stay on the island.

Yes, there are still crazy-rich Californians, living glamorous lives, and holding onto crazy-big dreams. But they are in the minority “Most of us who are pursuing our dreams are seeking grit, not glamour,” said Mathews.

That’s due in part to the high cost of living here. In the audience question-and-answer session, Mathews was asked whether he’s spoken with anyone who has a new vision for housing—one that would allow more Californians to stay here.

“There are a lot of ideas,” said Mathews, but they’re mostly at the local level. Although cocktail party conversation all over the state centers on housing costs, the subject is not part of the larger statewide political conversation. None of the new politicians who took office last week mentioned it in their announcements; it hasn’t been a component of any major speeches.

Why, asked another audience member, do Californians cling to the narrative that high taxes make it difficult to run a business here? How does this square with the fact that the world’s most valuable companies continue to be founded here?

Mathews said that the narrative is flawed because low taxes have not made Alabama a wealthy state, and high taxes have not made Sweden a poor country.. But in some parts of California, lower taxes or regulatory exemptions might help economies—and in other parts of the state, they don’t make sense. “We’re not easily one state, and regulation policy in one part of the state doesn’t make sense in the other,” he said.

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In advance of the Zócalo event “What is the California Dream Now?,” we asked that very question to people who study, live, and work around the state.

The post A Humbler California Dream appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.