Beyond Ambition

A meditation on drives

Have you ever been asked “What’s your ambition?” and couldn’t find a satisfying answer?
Did you use to have one and now feel strange for no longer having it?
How do you reconcile the paradox of embracing your ambition fully and not letting it take over who you truly are?
How do you make sense of your own ambition if you have seen how much wreckage its blind pursuit has done on other people?

This post is for those who wrestle with these questions. I’ve wrestled with them for a while, and want to share with you what I found.

The first time reading the phrase “essential falsity”, I was struck by an unspeakable felt sense, almost as if I could only put a finger on this slippery insight rather than holding with my whole hand. Only on the 10th time rereading this passage that an Aha came.

First, while ambition at its core is false, we have to take it as if it were true in order to fully know that truth.

Fortunately or not, taking ambition as if it were true seems easy for many people. For some people, that comes easily. If you have ever been consumed by a big goal, you know that it becomes your life. There is no point in trying to talk someone out of his ambition.

As an example, I remember my ambition to go to college in the US. Had someone told me “Oh, where you go doesn’t matter as long as you are fully engaged in the learning”, I’d dismiss that as hypocritical.

Second, “essential” here has to do with necessity. Ambition has to be false. Such falsity is an inevitable built-in of the human experience, a feature and not a bug.

Which means that if you have never had an burning ambition, you maybe skipping steps too soon. “Essential” also implies that it takes a while to go under the surface to…

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