In the background, my music shifted to an old and familiar song that I hadn’t listened to in some time.

It hit different this time. I hadn’t heard it in years. Maybe even decades. The lyrics are one thing, the delivery is… well… Ruffin. Joe Cocker couldn’t pull it off, and I like Joe Cocker.

As I walk this land of broken dreams
I have visions of many things
But happiness is just an illusion
Filled with sadness and confusion…

“What Becomes of the Broken Hearted”, 1966, Performed by Jimmy Ruffin, written by William Weatherspoon, Paul Riser, and James Dean.

And just like that, I wasn’t working on the novel anymore but suddenly remembering from that lyric Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams“:

I walk this empty street
On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Where the city sleeps
And I’m the only one, and I walk alone…

“Boulevard of Broken Dreams”, American Idiot (2004), Green Day.

I looked into it. No direct connection whatsoever. Yet it’s a common theme in literature and lyrics, walking through broken dreams, and it gets recycled quite a bit. The theme goes back to the earliest parts of literature, but the text referring to walking through broken dreams in any way probably doesn’t go back as far.

Richard Feynman once spoke about ‘good ideas keep coming back’, an idea of ideas being refined through time, and this is a sexy way to look at things as good ideas keep coming back. Lyrics about walking through broken dreams, however, doesn’t seem like something we would want to repeat – but we do.

Regardless of what the dreams are about in any instance, there’s enough people that can related to walking through broken dreams enough that this is a theme that if we observe outside of time and watch move around us… it’s cyclic.

Why? I’m sure nobody can give an answer to that for everyone.

Is it that we sell children on the notions of things that they cannot achieve in the world we created?

Is it that the carrot is so much more distant than the stick?

I think it’s just that we’re constantly recalibrating our expectations against our reality, however we got them, and that we’re finding somewhere along the way, somehow, we got bullshitted.

And it sucks.

We consistently recognize it.

As a species, we just keep stumbling through boulevards of broken dreams.