The old American dream was all about the house and the car and the picket fence.

The new dream, well, maybe you can manifest it with your vision board.

I'm Meg Walitzer and on this selected shorts stepping into idealized lives and what it costs us.

Stay tuned for Claire Danes, Tony Hale, and Anne Mira reading stories about supposedly perfect lives. You're listening to selected shorts where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction one short story at a time.

You're a selected short listener which means you love stories.

I'm going to go one step further to say that each and every one of you is also a storyteller with a powerful imagination.

No, no, no, I hear you saying, I'm not a storyteller, I can never make anything up.

I'm much too literal for that.

I'm a tax lawyer, I'm a dermatologist. I'm a cater waiter.

What stories do I have? But listen, you tell your own story and the stories of those

around you all the time.

Think about it, you probably create any number of wild possible futures for yourself,

often idealized hopes and dreams come true every day.

And at the same time you might well let your mind drift off into little imaginary scenarios

about the people you interact with at your job or the ones you see waiting online at the DMV. I bet you try and

conjure up entire stories involving the amazing perfect lives of the people you

envy or the terrible lives of the people who slited you even years ago. You know, that kid

in fifth grade who said your arms were scrawny, you might have a whole story about what became

of that person. Nothing good, I'm afraid. And it doesn't even

matter if the story you tell is true. What matters is that it's yours. We're people and it's

hard to keep ourselves from conceiving better futures for ourselves

or comparing ourselves to others. I don't think we can help it. So let's dig into these ideas in today's

...