In John Steinbeck’s 1947 novella The Pearl, we follow Kino, an indigenous man in California, who wants life to be different for his family, and especially for his infant son, Coyotito. One day, he finds a pearl with the potential to transform his life: to provide his son with the education he never received and to bestow respect on his family. But his obsession with the pearl puts him and his loved ones in peril, and ultimately results in the tragic death of Coyotito. 

The Pearl is a devastating parable about ambition, greed, and the struggle to rise above your lot in life. Josh Safdie’s 2025 sport-comedy-heist drama, Marty Supreme, tells a similar story, about a young Jewish man, Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), who works as a shoe salesman but dreams of becoming a world champion table tennis player. His obsession with being the best leads to him stealing from his family, putting his friends in danger, and almost getting his kind-of-girlfriend and unborn child killed. But Marty Supreme has a different ending to The Pearl. While the death of Coyotito marks the end of Kino’s dreams (he throws away the pearl only after his son’s death), the birth of Marty’s child signifies a transformation.

While some have interpreted the birth of Marty’s son as the dissolution of his dreams – GQ’s Frazier Thorpe described it as “a prison and or death of some sort” – Safdie viewed the ending as a revelation. “When he looks into the soul of his child, it is no longer about him,” Safdie told Ben Affleck on the Director’s Cut podcast. “I mean, it’s still about him because he’s thinking about himself, but… he goes through life trying to rule the world just to realise the world is this son.” As the job market worsens and capitalism makes us increasingly miserable, more and more young people are being forced to confront a version of this reality. They are not necessarily realising that a child is the answer, but that their purpose in life might not be solely tied to professional success. And with that comes not a death, but a type of freedom. 

Kalia, 26, hasn’t given up on her dream of becoming a film director, but circumstances have led her to a different idea of what success looks like. It has taken her six years at four different colleges to earn a film degree, but she is aware that to make it in film takes a level of privilege, money and connections that she doesn’t have. Even with these obstacles, Kalia remains resolute. “I inherently believe in my own success and believe that I will be a film director,” she tells Dazed. But as she enters her mid-twenties, Kalia has come to terms with the fact that the films she’s interested in making probably won’t have mass appeal. “I like to play with psychology through images and sounds that may be more challenging for viewers used to the IP-driven blockbuster market. I’ve let go of the idea of being famous or making millions of dollars off my work,” she says. “I just want to create without boundaries, even if that means I manage retail stores for the rest of my life and it takes 20 more years for me to get my feature off the ground. I’ve accepted that time is on my side.” 

I just want to create without boundaries, even if that means I manage retail stores for the rest of my life 

When you are young and ambitious, time can feel like the opposite of that. In the second half of Marty Supreme, Marty is on a race against time as he tries to figure out how he’s going to pay off his fine to the International Table Tennis Association (ITTA) and travel to Tokyo for the World Championship. He doesn’t even consider giving up or trying again next year. It’s now or never. Similar to Kalia, 24-year-old Arty found themselves rethinking these very notions of time and success after dropping out of university due to poor mental health. “[It] was a dream-shattering experience for me. I was always a high performer, so it was deeply painful, embarrassing, and shameful when I dropped out,” they confess. “It changed me a lot. Losing everything, or what felt like everything, has given me a certain level of freedom. It helped me get rid of this very rigid idea of how my twenties and thirties are supposed to look.”  

This earth-shattering experience birthed something new in Arty. It allowed them to find fulfilment in non-school or work-related pursuits: “Being a dropout has provided me with the flexibility to engage in the things that I enjoy without the pressure of convention. It’s allowed me to follow my interests through hobbies and volunteering without worrying about how it relates to a job.” As the BBC reported last year, Gen Z is plagued by employment pessimism, as entry-level roles have fallen by 35 per cent in the US and 44.8 per cent in the UK. With this in mind, it’s not surprising that there has been a rise in ‘cosy hobbies’. From crochet and drawing to supper clubs and pottery, young people like Arty are seeking their purpose elsewhere and communally.

I’ve spent my whole 20s living a precarious life to pursue creative endeavours, and now I’m exhausted. In my 30s, I want to prioritise living my life rather than simply working through it

31-year-old Billie is in the process of giving up on trying to be a full-time journalist altogether. For the past four years, she has tried to prioritise her journalism career but tells Dazed that “it’s been getting harder and harder to stay afloat”. She continues: “In 2025, it’s not really the career that Nora Ephron movies and Sex and the City led me to believe. I’ve spent my whole 20s living a precarious life to pursue creative endeavours, and now I’m exhausted. In my 30s, I want to prioritise living my life rather than simply working through it.”

At the end of his conversation with Affleck, Safdie remarked that “Dreams are for the lonely.” In Marty Supreme and The Pearl, we see both Kino and Marty go on long, isolating, and arduous journeys to make their dreams come true, with little regard for anyone else in their lives. We applaud this type of behaviour in society and did so during the press run for Marty Supreme, when the film’s Instagram account started posting pictures of some of the world’s best athletes and musicians in Marty Supreme jackets. From Tom Brady and Misty Copeland to Susan Boyle, the Instagram captions read in big, bold letters “DREAM BIG”. But what young people like Billie are starting to ask is: at what cost? 

For Marty, it was at the cost of his relationships and, to some extent, his humanity; for Kino, it was his son. Dreams can be wonderful things, and we all deserve access to our hearts’ desires, but so many beautiful things can be learned and appreciated when we stop thinking solely about our own wants; when we give up, fail or scale back our ambitions. Rather than thinking about what we lose in these vulnerable moments, we should also ask ourselves what we gain? We might be surprised to realise that it’s a hell of a lot.