YOLO baby!
You only live once, so go fast and keep it movin’. Each clock tick compels you. Idle time’s wasted time. Always be climbing, never be satisfied. You can rest when you’re dead.
Cool, worthwhile people are in constant motion and always crushing it, yet also more centered, connected and fulfilled than everyone else. All at once.
Only boring, lame people don’t abide by this infinite ambition. They’re the unwashed masses who lose at life by being unexceptional, content… normal. How sad.
If you don’t stand above you sulk below. If you’re not first you’re last.
….
Yeah… no. Not at all.
That’s horrible. And wrong.
It forces anxiety on every moment and stresses everyone out. It creates artificial urgency and makes us feel inadequate in the process. It fuels the obscene classism and runaway wealth inequality that’s made so much of history the raging dumpster fire it’s been. And it keeps us from focusing on the really important things in life.
The good news is that we have the power to change this. We just have to change the way we understand and value ambition, strength and success.
Sure it goes against our base psychology and challenges human nature itself, but hey life’s all about challenges. Plus let’s face it human nature needs some work.
Don’t get me wrong – it’s a moonshot. I doubt anything I’m about to say will change anything.
Still, it needs to be said. Things aren’t where they need to be. We’re socially sick and fast reaching a breaking point. We need to try something different if we want life to get better. We have to calm the fuck down.
So let’s start with a new rule: we shouldn’t automatically look up to people with ambition or achievement… and we shouldn’t automatically look down on people without them. We need to understand them in context.
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Before going on, a key distinction. There are 2 different types of ambition: ambition of purpose, and ambition of placement.
Ambition of purpose is what you freely, excitedly pursue when you don’t have to worry about anything else. It’s love-driven – done purely for its own sake. Whether the people you care about or the things that move you, it’s the good stuff. The source of passion and meaning that make you feel really, truly alive.
This is NOT about ambition of purpose. We should always be connecting with people, bettering our presence and deepening ourselves. These are the roots of fulfillment and the keys to living our best life.
This is about ambition of placement – what’s pursued for money, power, security, status, attention or access. Unlike purpose, placement is fear-driven – done to not suffer… to have enough of something.
Because it meets our basic needs, it gets most of our attention. It’s why when we talk about ambition we usually mean ambition of placement. Higher-level fulfillment’s real hard to get if we’re wanting for food, shelter, safety, health care, quality social access or other staples.
These basics are also way easier to see. A nice place in the right neighborhood, prestigious job, cash to burn and status are all shiny social proof – things everyone wants and envies. We’re animals – our instinct screams from the deep that life’s a bestial competition where whoever has the highest status and biggest/nicest pile of stuff “wins.” That’s how all other animal life works, so “that’s just the way it is.” It’s our stuck-in-the-jungle evolutionary psychology at work.
…But other animal life’s also a brutal, desperate, kinda shitty existence. It may be cool for primitive creatures whose only real goals are staying alive and making babies, but, and I can’t believe I actually need to say this, we shouldn’t be OK with stuck-in-the-jungle. Like, at all. We’re a lot more advanced than other animals… we shouldn’t be benchmarking our being against theirs. We can do better. We fucking need to do better.
So, let’s try something new.
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We need to understand that ambition’s expensive. And by expensive I don’t mean money – I mean life currencies: our time, our energy and our attention.
These are precious, limited resources.
Whenever we decide to be more ambitious, we’re forced to spend more life currency. Going after more means having to do more… which means a thinner spreading of our ourselves across each new obligation.
But people are very finite, very imperfect beings – we can’t give real, quality investment to much before shit goes sideways. Even over-investment in one thing (like a job) can ruin us for others. The problem’s that many different things need certain amounts of currency in order for us to get the most out of life.
Of course saying this is modern blasphemy. We live in a time of almost fanatical optimism where it’s just naturally assumed that being more ambitious and doing more is always better than not. That if you just want-it-and-will-it hard enough and budget every second of your time correctly, you can do everything endlessly, constantly advance and eventually have it all.
Bullshit. 💩
Ambition’s far more expensive than we care to admit, and we’re not as infinite as we like to think. We need to start acknowledging these realities for what they really are.
Ambition always looks awesome on paper, especially in American media. But most of its practical, day-to-day realities are pretty boring and often pretty brutal… basically the opposite of awesome. And it’s not a 50/50 sorta thing…it’s more like a 95%+ boring and ~1-5% awesome thing. We live in the day-to-day… not the highlight reels we see on TV and social media.
Over-confidence is our social plague. We’re taking on too much to look good, and the obsession with having it all and winning at all costs is killing us. It incentivizes a lot of bad, sad things. We’re living life in burnout – constantly late for the next thing and not fully present. It’s much of why we’re so fucking stressed out, cranky, depleted and depressed so much of the time. We’re chasing the dragon.
More isn’t always better – often, it’s actually worse. We have to make careful choices with our currencies – and we need to understand ambition and achievement in context of their costs.
In other words, is the juice really worth the squeeze? Because often, it’s a wash, and often, it’s not.
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Before getting into what this means, two pieces of social gamesmanship to keep in mind as you read and think about this stuff in your day-to-day life:
(1) Some claim their ambition of placement IS their ambition of purpose. That what they’re doing for security and status is exactly what they’d freely choose to do if they didn’t have to worry about anything else. That they don’t mind its huge costs because their money-maker and life’s purpose are one and the same.
Always take this claim with a HUGE grain of salt. Once you look closer and learn more you find it’s rarely (like Purple Unicorn-rarely) authentic, persistent truth. Most high-ambitioners grind themselves away on things they’d rather not being doing to get the rewards they offer. The rest, even when they like what they do, live in drowning saturation (think King Midas – in the beginning he loved gold more than anything, but at the end all he really wanted was a fucking sandwich). Ambition of purpose and ambition of placement are rarely compatible with each other.
(2) Many claim that they can handle demanding tasks more easily and effectively than other people. And because of their superior ability they can effortlessly win at lots more things than others without it phasing them. All they do is win win win no matta what…
Again, boulder-sized grain of salt here. When you look closer and learn more, you typically find that they’re nowhere near as winning as they’re acting – it’s a fake-it-‘til-ya-make it sorta thing. Or they’re like a duck: calm on the surface, but furiously paddling underwater (which isn’t healthily sustainable). From the outside they look like they’re doing it all, but they’re usually stressfully working their ass off on mostly one thing while paying dime-deep attention to the rest. They’re almost never as centered, well-rounded and in-control as they’re trying to appear. Remember: crushing it takes a lot, and human currency is limited.
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Alright – let’s explore how the limitation of currency and the costs of ambition intertwine. To do that, we need to look at how achievement affects the achiever’s life as a whole – not just the shiny, outwardly-visible part.
Education – Most high-ambition pursuits require hardcore schooling, which requires huge investments of time, energy and attention during the most-formative years of life. This means less opportunity for the random, fun exploration and socializing that not only makes the best memories but teaches the street smarts and organic social skills formal education either can’t or won’t teach. These things are the most important part of adult success in everything… and basically of life in general. Most academics (especially the STEM subjects) strengthen the left brain at the expense of the right… which tends to stunt social development and numb emotional awareness.
Advanced education’s also wildly expensive. It saddles graduates with mountains of debt it’s taking longer and longer to pay off… if they ever do. This means they have to work that much harder to service that debt. As time passes the costs of education are increasingly outweighing its benefits.
…and that’s just the prerequisite. Once the fancy opportunity’s gotten, it has to be exploited. And standout success means standout sacrifice of all currencies.
Time: Time is life’s most valuable asset, and prestigious, high-ambition pursuits almost always dominate the pursuer’s time. Long work hours are bad enough, but now the lines separating work and personal life are blurred. Often work follows wherever they go, looming over and inserting itself into what’s supposed to be free time. Having control over our time is really important. If work’s always there and what little free time’s left gets sunk into errands and recovery, the person’s life isn’t *really* their own. They’re essentially an indentured servant in a gilded cage. They’re basically living for vacation and retirement.
Energy and Attention: These long hours often require an intense, shifting, unending mental focus and emotional discipline which amounts to an ongoing assault on both head and heart. Worse, there’s often little margin for error: one mistake or missed piece of information can easily cost hours of additional work, serious money, their job, career and/or reputation. This is the psychological equivalent of tap-dancing on a tightrope – a huge level of ongoing stress that continuously drains energy and diminishes presence.
The typical result is a “there-but-not-there” state of being – a kind of mental fog that, while the person may be physically-present at something, means they aren’t mentally- or emotionally-present. Just showing up isn’t enough – people need leftover energy and attention to be able to really experience and enjoy things. Over time living without this leftover currency ruins social opportunity and damages mental health, emotional stability and general well-being.
What’s more, most high-ambition pursuits condition people into a sort of “work machine” mentality – to think in terms of the specific, technical knowledge they use to do their job. While this is good for their job, it’s usually really bad for compelling, connective social interaction. People deal with boring logistical things enough as it is…they don’t want to hear about them in their free time. They want their mood elevated and emotions spiked, and talking about work and life maintenance rarely do that. Usually they’re boring, mood-killing chores to hear.
Human Ugliness: The more competitive and high-stakes something gets, the more false pretense, passive-aggression, politicking, gaslighting, manipulation, lying, cheating, end-running, backstabbing and other behind-the-scenes bullshit comes with it. The more human ugliness you experience in isolation. The saying “It’s not personal, it’s just business” is a contradiction in terms – betrayal in business directly (and strongly) affects the personal. Living in these circumstances darkens a person’s world view and worsens their behavior – you can’t stay positive if continually exposed to negative.
All of these are serious, life-shaping costs that deeply affect different people in different ways. It’s just really hard to see most of the time because people hide it to look good… which is it’s own painful burden.
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TO BE CLEAR – I am NOT trying to demean or condemn high-ambition pursuits or the people who do them. Wanting success isn’t a bad thing, and demonizing ambitious/successful people is stupid and achieves nothing.
What I’m trying to do is give perspective to the nature of ambition and achievement. Rather than being automatically impressed by and envious of the money and prestige of someone’s position, look at that success (and what it entails) more deeply. Realize that standout success is dearly-bought, and that there shouldn’t be an automatic respect for and worship of it. Ambitious, successful people make choices with their lives that, like any other choices, come with certain benefits… and certain drawbacks. They shouldn’t be seen as better or worse than average joes – only different.
What really matters is the quality and social grace with which we do our jobs. Whatever you do, do it well and make interaction with you good. Whether a barista or a lawyer, people should be always be respected and appreciated if they handle their responsibilities well and are pleasant to interact with. Period.
It’s the social, emotional value we place on ambition of placement that’s at the heart of what keeps classism, wealth inequality, corruption and other lesserness alive and thriving. It’s why no political system has any chance of ever solving any of these problems without us first toning-down the way we think about, and, more importantly, feel about money, status and achievement.
I want people to not just know, but understand it really IS our passions, our presence, and our connection to others that matter most. And that we have to not just know, but understand this in order to become better than we are.
In order to evolve.