I think only a small minority of people have their own dreams to pursue or at any rate the motivation to get off their butts and do something if not forced by necessity. I know I am not one of them. Anecdotally I knew some rich kids - one of them went snowboarding all the time, but was not interested in trying to be a professional, competitive snowboarder, it was just leasure. Another, a girl, was just focusing being a big rebel and annoying parents by adopting or at any rate left-anarchists views, yet obediently going into law school when the parents made an ultimatum.

In other words, I am pretty much of the opposite view: to have motivation to do something, you need to "stay hungry", unless you are not the small minority of hyper-optimistic people who think doing stuff actually matters and they end up sooner or later moving to Silicon Valley to team up with fellow optimists.

Or maybe I am mixing with unusually pessimistic people but on the whole pretty much everybody I know does not think the work they are doing is making the world at any rate a better place, they just do it to make a living, they see a business as some rich guy making profits and giving them a cut called salary but not primarily as something that benefits customers, and their general mood is envy. From this angle it is seriously hard to have any passions or dreams or at any rates not productive ones, but more like "one day I will get rich and pimp it around and rub into all your faces".

It is hard to say which view is more realistic, but let me put it this way - in the past a lot of people believed things like "idle hands invite the devil", believed that if a man is not constantly burdened, forced by necessity to do work he will just turn to drinking or later on in history, to drugs, a lot of young rich people I know are drug addicts of the raver type and I have several older rural relatives who when not having must-do work they have no clue how to kill their time and indeed they get drunk as a general solution.

I also don't see how a pursue-your-dreams view fits into the biological view of man. I think the ancestral environment is far more about negative motivation: there are all kinds of pain like hunger, predator threat or similar things, and they were far more often running away from something painful than running towards something pleasurable.

Finally, how much pleasure was there throughout history? I hope you are familiar with Henryk Sienkiewicz's historical novels like With Fire And Sword and The Deluge? What strikes me about them is how early modern nobility loved warfare largely because their life at peacetime was incredibly boring, with nothing to do. Plan B at peacetime was sitting in a dull rural house managing peasants who don't need much managing, occasionally some hunting and getting drunk with retainers? Boring. War meant adventure and glory. The point is that there were no positive goals to pursue, just negative ones like avoid getting killed, hungry or ill.

There are more opportunities now but why would expect this mindset to change so much? Especially where would people get the optimism, the sense of empowerment to believe they can make any sort of difference in the world?