When Gillian Perry thinks of her future, she first likes to imagine all the most far-fetched possibilities: living in a hermitage in Russia, working on a farm while communing with sheep or wandering the wilderness like in Werner Herzog’s movie “Aguirre.” Perry believes these possibilities would make her happiest, but she also feels that they are unachievable.

“When there are expectations on a person in the modern world, you have to be more realistic for the most part,” Perry said. “While I’d like to be a wandering oboist, it’s impossible for that to really pan out with the trajectory of what people are funneled into.”

Our modern world casts uncertainty over Perry’s own future adventures, so instead, she has embarked on learning of others’ adventures by looking into archived works and curatorial studies. This has led her to discover new interests.

“I want to be able to peruse the history of things, and it’s important to me to be able to track time like that, and to have a model of how humanity has played out,” Perry said.

Perry’s desire for these adventures comes from her dislike towards the capitalist society in the U.S. She wants to create her own path, free from the traditional patterns of life many follow.

“I don’t want to be involved in capitalism,” Perry said. “I don’t want to participate in this system that oppresses so many people and I don’t want to fall under the yoke of my own oppression by participating in it.”

Last year, Perry became captivated by the morphology of the folktale and the tracking of its arc. This provided her with a sense of calmness, stemming from the knowledge that there’s a narrative that repeats over and over as the future progresses.

This interest in the tracking of history has sparked Perry’s desire to be an art museum curator. She feels current society is focused too heavily on trends — becoming more bent towards making money, isolationism, and decrying learning in favor of quick solutions, but sees art as a cure for it all, by letting us look into how people used to live and helping us apply past principles to our lives.

Ever since she was young, she loved art museums more than any place in the world; this also encouraged her passion to become a curator. Detroit Institute of Art was one museum that stood out to her.

“I remember being in the Rivera Court [of Detroit Institute of Art] and just looking around me and being surrounded by all of that beauty, and just wanting to drown in it and stay there forever,” Perry said. “If I can create that reality for myself, that would be one of the best-case scenarios,”

Perry does not make art herself but writes poetry and hopes one day her work will be displayed, allowing her to achieve immortality via arts and letters.

Right now, Perry has two ideas of what she will do after school: going to college and interning at an art museum, or taking a couple years off to travel and discover new hobbies. Perry is unsure about the college route because of her strong desire to stray from the path of capitalism.

“[Going to college] involves networking and billing yourself as some optimized version of who you are, and competing and so on,” Perry said. “I really don’t want to be part of that at all. Just thinking about it is sickening to me. But what’s at the end of it is good, so maybe I’ll try that.”

Perry believes our society encourages us to be too individualistic when what we should be doing is finding common ground with others, and working as a community. She too has fallen into working as an individual instead of a group but knows that can’t happen if we want to break down class and social divides.

“I really hope that people can shift towards more of a collective mindset because if anything, a huge problem right now is realizing how isolated we’ve been and how insular our lives have gotten,” Perry said.

In her future, Perry also hopes to be surrounded by fruit, decadence and warm light. She wants to do a lot of traveling to immerse herself in different cultures and wants to own a poodle. Above all, Perry just wants to be happy.

“Throughout my life, I’ve just never been able to accept anything that I think is unjust, and that’s been a problem, but it’s also been something of a gift because I have a firm idea of which direction I want to go in,” Perry said. “I think it’s good that I won’t accept anything else for myself because I think that’s how people can be happiest.”