ambition isn't busted

but it might be beside the point

Hello! This past week, I noticed a flurry of conversation amongst a set of writers I read about ambition. The narrative was familiar, but I found myself responding in a new way. So I’m weighing in! 

if it was the ambition of this perfect Cape Cod coffee outpost to bake the most divine strawberry-peach muffin, I’d say they nailed it

girl who nods

In school, I sat at the front of the class. Not only did I look earnestly up at the teacher as they riffed on Macbeth, or mitosis, or the burgeoning wolf populations of the Alaskan Alpine, I nodded along, with enthusiasm. By a few years into college, I’d become known for my nodding (wow cringe), and if my friends hadn’t given me endless shit for it (god bless u), I’d still be a zealous nodder today. (I sometimes relapse—though it’s become more akin to audible murmurs, because you can’t “sit in the front row” from a Zoom square …)

I can trace the exact moment this habit was born: I was at field hockey practice (a sport I was … very bad at) freshman year of high school, and I overheard two coaches talking about a teammate who had just made the varsity team. “She’s a good listener—she sits in the front, she nods along. She’s really invested.” This girl was that way: oozing earnestness, first to volunteer to do cone clean-up. And TBH, she wasn’t even that good at field hockey—but she was varsity material. So I internalized the lesson: if effort alone didn’t translate to winning, the performance of effort could get you pretty close. So I became a nodder (sorry, everyone else in Brit Lit II). 

Simply put, nodding is my personal ambition giveaway. Cringey as it is, it reveals one of my most essential human qualities: I want to be good at something. Maybe even get noticed for it. We all do. But we also know that “vaulting ambition” might lead us down dangerous paths—maybe not toward murder, exactly, (whattup again, Macbeth, and RIP King Duncan), but to a more modern affliction. Specifically: is ambition to blame for our overwhelm?

Last week, Alisha Ramos re-launched her newsletter and admits to a career-shifting panic in her first essay, Who Am I Without My Ambition?. Amanda Montei announced a “semi-online break” she’s forcing herself to take in her post On Ambition. And Anne Helen Petersen interviewed Rainesford Stauffer about her book All the Gold Stars, claiming that This Will Change the Way You Think About Ambition. 

The through-line in each of these pieces is familiar: I thought external markers of success would fulfill me. So I kept trying to achieve them, but I felt emptier and emptier. I burned myself out trying, and I learned that success doesn’t actually = happiness. I’m breaking up with my ambition! 

This “ambition is canceled” narrative definitely isn’t new. It’s related to last summer’s quiet quitting takeover, and to a shift in how we think about meaning that exploded mid-pandemic. And it’s been in the ether for even longer; I read The Atlantic’s The Ambition Interviews in 2016, right after I first moved in with Mike, and considered for the first time the effects a dual-income household might have on my own ambitions.

But as I read about ambition this week, I detected a shift in my reaction to a subtext that’s always been present in the narrative: everything is just so hard right now. This sentiment felt apt as we navigated a post-2016 election, and necessary in the midst of a global pandemic. But now, the suggestion that it’s just impossible to get through the day no longer offers relief; it just makes me feel … tired. And I’m tired of feeling tired.

To be clear, the overall narrative around ambition as a hedonic treadmill has resonated since I first heard it; I’m an absolute sucker to the achievement trap (see: the nodding). But hearing  another round of “recovering perfectionists” blame their ambition for their burnout made me wonder: is this really ambition’s fault? 

ambition as distraction

In his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman points out how normal it’s become to feel that “you absolutely must do more than you can do.” He goes on to explain the absurdity of this premise:

“It’s not just that this situation feels impossible; in strictly logical terms, it really is impossible. It can’t be the case that you must do more than you can do. That notion doesn’t make any sense: if you truly don’t have time for everything you want to do, or feel you ought to do, or that others are badgering you to do, then, well, you don’t have time—no matter how grave the consequences of failing to do it all might prove to be.”

Burkeman’s point is painfully true: we’re all delusional about the breadth of everything we want to experience, accomplish, be. Given this, admitting to a sense of overwhelm, and a willingness to step back from our goals, brings about a sense of relief. And, as in the pieces I read on ambition this week, hearing someone else admit to their sense of overwhelm—and how they’re breaking up with their ambition—is even better. It offers permission: maybe I can break up with that annoying voice in my head telling me I gotta eat more kale.

But Burkeman’s framing made me think that this isn’t a case of ambition being a broken, abused cultural concept for us to blame. Rather, our want—and, crucially, the limited time on earth we have to fulfill it—is an innate truth we just have to accept.

“Technically,” he says, “it’s irrational to feel troubled by an overwhelming to-do list. You’ll do what you can, you won’t do what you can’t, and that tyrannical inner voice insisting that you must do everything is simply mistaken.”

This perspective makes me less interested in “assigning ambition” to the ways I spend my time. Of course, I’m still interested in trying, even in achieving. But cataloging ambition feels like a distraction from the real goal: to listen to ourselves and pay attention to our needs, and to do the same for our kids, our partners, our neighbors, our besties, our communities, and the people or parties who benefit from the work we do. It doesn’t really matter to me if the resulting actions from that listening—baking a show-off-y cake (which I’m doing for my mom’s birthday this weekend), sleeping in (which these days for me is sleeping until maaaybe 6:45, lit), or writing this newsletter (hello!)—are considered “ambitious” or “not ambitious.” It seems a bit beside the point.

And we know it’s a lose-lose either way: if you have too much ambition, it’s embarrassing and try-hard (remember when everyone hated Anne Hathaway?) or greedy, and if you don’t have enough, you’re lazy or worthless (especially if you’re the spawn of Logan Roy). So what if it’s not about vilifying ambition so much as understanding it as desire, an extremely human thing? 

We want. It’s ok to want. And we should do the things in our lives that help us feel energized by our wanting, not trapped by it. I quit IG because it made my want feel artificially claustrophobic; my ambition a trick mirror. But walking to my library and checking out six books at a time? That makes my want feel abundant, my ambition juicy. So does going to the fancy grocery store and bringing back a ball of pizza dough and a flask of Meyer Lemon vinegar and a loaf of chocolate ciabatta. So does watching A League of Their Own for the fortieth time.

So I will continue to try, to want, to nod along in class (sue me). And while I no longer feel the need I once did to perform my want (fine, sometimes I do—standby for pic of aforementioned birthday cake), I’m still interested in having it. Call it ambition if you want. But calling it living is probably more accurate.

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Thanks for reading! Let me know about your relationship to ambition these days, or else what’s giving you that six-library-books-ball-of-pizza-dough feeling.

Love,
Becca

went to New York; saw a crane. more on this emerging story to come