The Audacity of Lacking Ambition
With the entrance into any new social dynamic, whether it’s a new workplace, new friend group… there’s that moment (or group of moments) in which you have to explain who you are. And this tend to comes in small, simplified bursts about where you’re from, what you do for work, what you do in your free time (aka hobbies?)… And in those moments, I’m filled with a heavy dose of self-reflection, because now I’m having to construct a neat narrative of who I am in a concise, easy-to-understand way: 28, from Dallas, likes to do yoga, read, and write, hang with her cats, have a generally chill time.
And following these moments, I usually walk away with a sense of lacking, especially in the realm of achievement. Like whatever I do, I should do it with a fervor geared towards a clear goal. (This is especially present amongst bougie situations but exists in others as well.) It’s hard to quantify because it’s subtle — its in the questions people ask, the topics they fail to engage in, like we’re all weighing each other out to assess our social value.
Or maybe I’m simply projecting all of that because I feel counter-cultural for not even desiring ambition.
My success is measured in how fulfilling my life is in that moment instead of external success (although that can help). It goes so much deeper than that, to that nugget of core being.
All of this might sound rather vague — maybe that’s because I’m still formulating a clear understanding myself. (Which is a multi-step process of recognizing my own feelings of lacking, pinpointing what exactly they are, and narrowing what the source of that trigger is.)
Since I was a child, I’ve measured my value in achievement, focusing my efforts on getting good grades and trying to partake in activities that could be interpreted as “impressive.” And then I graduated college, entered the real world, and with each passing day, I feel like capable of playing the role of “achiever.” I don’t think striving so fiercely to constantly prove myself did much to prepare me for the experience of simply being a human being, which I find to be much more challenging than any test or paper I’ve encountered in school.
Progressing from school to work, I’ve encountered similar pressures to constantly prove my value as an employee. I understand the need to work while at work, but I don’t see the need to take it all so seriously, to feel defined by this thing we do out of obligation to live. And I know there are people who truly love their job, and whose desire to achieve is intuitive, but that’s not me.
I’m willing to a decent to great job depending on my mental/emotional/physical capacities, but I can’t get down with pushing myself everyday to be the “best” (AKA most productive) version of myself — that’s a recipe for a mental breakdown.
But I can show up and be a human, and out of responsibility and respect, do what I can to deliver at the highest ability I can muster that day. But to kill myself (which is what stress literally does) everyday to make someone more money (even if I’m included in that) is just total nonsense to me.
It’s funny reflecting on my time in Europe and people remarking to me about how much Americans love to work; it was genuinely perplexing to them. Which makes sense, right? Work is pretty much the opposite of “fun,” and we’ve chosen to make it the center of our lives. If that wasn’t your life, and you saw people doing it by choice, wouldn’t you also be confused?
And maybe there’s the perception that you don’t choose to work so much/hard, that it’s necessitated by what it takes to live here (which isn’t invalid). The choice is made by the communal collective, our culture at large when each of us wakes up and spends the majority of our day getting ready for work, going to work, being at work, coming home from work, and decompressing — we’re enabling it.
As self-righteous as I may sound, I don’t have a solution to this social epidemic of feeding off stress, living in a state of perpetual distraction, and getting further and further from the baseline experience of being a human. Which is compounded by the fact that for the first time in human history, we can have “social” interactions without ever seeing, talking to, or hearing another person. (In saying this, I don’t want to overlook the ways in which the Internet has facilitated community amongst previously underrepresented or isolated populations.)
Life in America in 2019 is weird.
The internet has become our opiate of the masses. This crazy thing called technology has provided so much stimulation and distraction that it can seem like a true substitute for being present in the world and all the experiences, interactions, and lessons that come with it. I mean, people end marriages over text message — that’s freaking crazy!
This is all to say that we live in a society that seems to be getting further and further from our humanity while simultaneously crying out for it. Memes, reality shows, podcasts, these are all substitutes for real human interaction — we get to observe life without actually experiencing it. Technology has made living an isolated, detached life not only convenient but enjoyable (in the short-term). Beyond work, think about how little people you interact with on a daily basis (and if this doesn’t apply to you, hats off to you). We drive to work, work, drive home, make dinner, watch TV, sleep (my broad generalization of an American work day); it’s like we’re living in our personal boxes of existence versus as part of the vast world around us. For the majority of human history, not being part of the tribe simply wasn’t an option. We needed it to survive, and we still do, but this has become less immediately obvious.
And then sometimes I just feel like that old hippie that everyone’s rolling their eyes at. Like, “We need to get in touch with our souls, man.”
But really, we do.
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