Practical plans versus pursuing dreams

Practical plans versus pursuing dreams is the conflict between a life made secure by following an established route and a life shaped by desires whose outcomes cannot be guaranteed. For Daniel Jae Ho Bae, the route is laid out by his family: excel, attend Yale, become a doctor, and proceed through the expected stages of adulthood. His poems and his encounter with Natasha Kingsley expose the uncertainty and longing that this plan leaves outside its boundaries. Their conversation does not resolve the conflict; it brings into focus two different ways of deciding what a life should be for.

Family Expectations and the Prescribed Route

Daniel’s sense of pressure changes when his older brother, Charlie Bae, is no longer the apparently flawless son against whom the family measures achievement. Daniel describes the paradox directly: Charlie had been “good enough for two sons,” but now that Charlie is no longer perfect, the pressure has shifted onto him. Academic performance becomes a repeated domestic test. His mother asks whether his grades are still acceptable, then presses him about why they are not yet an A and tells him it is time to get serious. Her worry is not simply about one grade; it expresses a larger expectation that Daniel should already be moving toward a successful future.

That future has a specific shape. Daniel is expected to pursue medicine, and the family treats deviation from that path as unavailable: “We’re on a track to be doctors, and there’s no getting off.” His mother’s comments about America making the boys soft add a generational judgment to the academic pressure. From her perspective, the comfort of life in America risks weakening their seriousness; Daniel counters that he and Charlie were born there and were always soft. The exchange shows how the family’s plan is bound up with ideas about discipline and growing up, not merely with a choice of profession.

Daniel has tried to claim a limited measure of choice over college. He refuses to apply to Harvard, the family’s Best School, and chooses Yale instead, partly because being Charlie’s younger brother at another school feels intolerable. Charlie’s suspension makes Daniel wonder whether Harvard would admit him anyway, but the refusal is still his own act of resistance. It does not free him from the expectation that he will become a doctor. Even the Yale interview is an obligation he is preparing to meet, rather than proof that he has found a calling.

The demands of that future sit alongside evidence of lives and interests that do not fit neatly into it. Before the interview, Daniel writes at the kitchen table in a Moleskine notebook, working on a poem about heartbreak despite never having experienced heartbreak himself. He can do so because his father is absent; Daniel believes his father disapproves of his poetry, even without saying so aloud. The poem is unfinished, and its subject is difficult for Daniel to write about, but the act of writing matters: it is a private pursuit that has not been granted the standing of his prescribed academic future.

His mother’s painting complicates the contrast between family duty and artistic life. Three years earlier, Daniel’s father hired part-time help for the family store so his mother would not have to work there every day, and gave her oil paints and canvases for her birthday. She cried over the gift and has painted ever since. Daniel wonders what her life might have been if she had never left Korea, never met his father, and never had Charlie and Daniel—whether she might have been an artist. Her painting is a concrete example of creative work taking root within the family, even as Daniel imagines the larger life it might have replaced. On the day of his interview, he wears a custom-tailored gray suit and a red tie his mother initially considers too bright; his confidence in the suit is real, but he recognizes that he is wearing it for the interview, not for something that matters to him.

The Appeal and Cost of Dreams

Daniel does not present his resistance as certainty about what he wants instead. He wishes he could want the life his parents want and believes it would be easier if he were passionate about becoming a doctor. He can name the apparent purpose of the profession—saving lives—but feels only indifference toward it. He also doubts his own claim to a creative future: the girl he sees absorbed in music reminds him that poetry is the only thing that has made him feel similarly transported, yet he thinks it can never go anywhere.

That doubt is sharpened by his awareness that a dream does not guarantee a livelihood or success. Daniel’s resistance is not a completed career plan but a refusal to accept that the safe route is automatically meaningful. He imagines the prescribed sequence as an unbroken itinerary: “Yale. Medical school. Residency. Marriage. Children. Retirement. Nursing home. Funeral home. Cemetery.” The list makes a lifetime seem settled in advance, with each practical milestone leading to the next until no room remains for alternatives. What troubles him is not simply having to choose; it is the prospect of being fixed in work and a future that mean nothing to him.

The story also places this conflict beside a harsher form of practical reality. Daniel’s family is facing deportation, and he connects that crisis to his father’s actions and to his father’s appeal to God’s plan. Daniel does not accept faith as a substitute for action, but avoids confronting his father because he does not want to speak with him. The episode distinguishes the fantasy of a predetermined plan from the practical need to respond to circumstances: when the family faces a serious threat, reassurance that events have a reason does not itself provide a strategy. Practicality can mean confronting consequences, not merely obeying the career path laid out by parents.

Natasha’s Chosen Practicality

Natasha gives Daniel a contrasting model of planning. When he explains that his first-generation Korean immigrant parents have set his future for him, he summarizes the arrangement as going to Yale and becoming a doctor regardless of what he wants. Asked whether he wants that life, he admits that he does not know what he wants. Natasha’s response that it is his life makes the decision sound like his responsibility, rather than a destiny assigned by family or circumstance.

Unlike Daniel, Natasha can name her intended profession without hesitation: she wants to become a data scientist. She explains the work as analyzing data, separating noise from signal, discerning patterns, drawing conclusions, and recommending actions. Her account is practical and specific, including the role of computers and the abundance of data. But she does not describe the career as a passion she has discovered or a fate that has claimed her. She says she chose it after researching growing scientific fields in the school library. For Natasha, the distinction is important: the choice arose from investigation, not destiny, and the work suits her personality.

Her view challenges Daniel’s assumption that a worthwhile life requires loving one’s work. When he asks whether she wants to do something she loves, she genuinely does not understand why love should be necessary. Daniel argues that a long life spent doing something one is only indifferent to would be difficult; Natasha replies that it can be even longer to spend chasing dreams that can never come true. Her practicality is not simply parental pressure repeated in another voice. It is presented as a decision she has made for herself, supported by research and an assessment of what fits her. That distinction leaves Daniel with a difficult comparison: a sensible plan can be self-directed, while a dream can remain vague and uncertain.

Natasha defends her caution with a numerical account of how few aspiring actors, writers, and rock stars achieve major success. In her estimate, most will not make it, some of the remainder will earn very little, and only the final fraction will become successful. Daniel teases her for sounding like his father, but her reasoning forces his concern into sharper form. She is not merely telling him to obey his parents; she is asking him to consider the opportunity cost of pursuing ambitions that may not succeed. The conflict is therefore between different claims about risk and meaning, not simply between courage and conformity.

The Argument and Its Unfinished Turn

Daniel asks whether seventeen-year-olds are really supposed to know what they want for the rest of their lives. Natasha, who dislikes uncertainty, asks whether he does not want to know. He says he wishes he could live ten lives at once. She hears this as reluctance to choose, but Daniel clarifies that his fear is getting stuck with something meaningless. His imagined future and his wish for multiple lives express the same pressure from opposite directions: he wants the freedom to explore, but he knows that choosing one route closes off others.

His answer rises beyond personal indecision into an argument about human capacity. Daniel invokes the ability to invent things that fly and to write poetry, then insists that people can lead large lives and make what they dream about. His declaration that people are born to dream is more passionate than he intends, but he means it. This is not evidence that he has discovered a workable alternative to medicine, nor that he has rejected Yale or resolved what he wants to do. Instead, it marks a change in the conversation: his vague discomfort becomes an explicit defense of imaginative possibility.

The scene ends with Daniel and Natasha meeting each other’s eyes, and with something between them that was not present a minute earlier. The exchange does not settle which of them is right. It makes their opposing positions personally consequential: Natasha’s composed, researched plan meets Daniel’s insistence that practicality should not become a reason to abandon the possibility of a larger life. The concept’s tension lies in that unresolved meeting, where planning can be an act of agency, but a plan inherited from others can also feel like a future already closed.