I am so curious to know how you would define the word "ambition"!! It feels like a super complicated idea that could easily have multiple essays of its own. Here are some things that could be conceived of as "ambitious"—where do they fall in your framework?
- Running for a powerful political office
- Starting a nonprofit that delivers vaccines to underserved populations
- Labouring away for 20 years to solve a difficult niche problem in mathematics that will be appreciated by only a small handful of people
- Writing and performing music simply for the joy of it, finding a huge fanbase online, and achieving great commercial success
- Raising a family of 6
Perhaps another angle on this question is: is there an ambitious and unambitious way to do every task? You can be a political organizer with great ambition who strives to make mass systemic change, or one who shows up to your local chapter, does an honest day's work and goes home. So, too, with being a musician, or parent, or scientist. The question your essay made me think of is: should we aim to be as "ambitious" as possible within our respective domains?
One more thing: Even Oppen ended up writing a book that won the Pulitzer Prize. Wouldn't the real unambitious thing be to stop writing poetry altogether and just enjoy spending time with family and friends and maybe show up to the occasional labour protest? Can an unambitious person have a Wikipedia page?
I've been speaking frequently with David about this idea that sometimes, the best wisdom for how to live is only shared in contexts where it cannot be broadcast widely. For instance, wisdom like "get off social media and live without an audience" is unlikely to be spoken on Twitter or Instagram. And even when public figures do say it, can you actually believe them? They are speaking to an audience, after all, thereby contradicting their own message.
Perhaps the advice to forgo one's ambition is the same. It feels suspicious coming from someone like George Oppen, or, indeed, from you, Michelle, both of whom I view as performing at the highest levels of their craft. I feel that perhaps I could only truly internalize the dictum "it's ok to squander your ambition" coming from someone of immense promise who forwent all opportunities for success in order to sit by the fire with their grandchildren—precisely the person who would never write a blog post or tweet or write a book in the first place.
Hi Matty :-) I'm finally getting to this. So. I'm going to write a definition "blind," just off the top of my own head, and then go through your list and see if that definition changes.
At this time, and thinking about what I meant when I wrote this essay, I think of ambition as "striving for an externally verifiable position/situation/state of affairs that can be ascribed to the greatness of the self." I think there are two parts to it -- the first is that it's externally verifiable, so being hired at X company could count, but "being happy inside" might not UNLESS you go to great lengths to prove it on social media, etc. And the second part is that the narrative you tell of this achievement returns back to the self: *I* did this. I know both of these things can be easily fuzzy, and often futzed with, so in practice what I think I was writing about was an ethos -- and I was doing my best to pin down that ethos, because the real answer is, "I know it when I'm around ambitious people because I feel it in my gut." (It has something to do with the way I've been approached in conversation... as though the conversation is constantly being mined for insights... the hungry eyes...)
Let's use your list.
- Running for a powerful political office -- This seems pretty ambitious in most cases.
- Starting a nonprofit that delivers vaccines to underserved populations -- This COULD be ambitious if done in a way that is loud and self aggrandizing, but it could also NOT be ambitious. I guess it depends on the "felt potential" of the person who does this, because if this is someone who everyone is saying could otherwise be President, then it's not ambitious at all. Maybe that introduces something new here, the sense of a person's potential. (It's also "ambitious" in another sense in that there are likely to be huge cultural and political barriers to doing this, and so in a way, this is just a difficult thing to do. But just because something is difficult, doesn't mean it's ambitious.)
- Labouring away for 20 years to solve a difficult niche problem in mathematics that will be appreciated by only a small handful of people -- TBH, I personally don't think this is very ambitious in the sense that I meant in the essay. It's of course intellectually ambitious, but because it's niche and doesn't lead to widespread acknowledgement, I don't think this is what I meant.
- Writing and performing music simply for the joy of it, finding a huge fanbase online, and achieving great commercial success -- This sounds lovely! I don't think it's ambitious because the public rewards seem almost accidental.
- Raising a family of 6 -- So, I would colloquially use the word "ambitious" to describe this, just because it seems challenging, but I would not use the word "ambitious" as I meant it *in this essay.*
So... where are we at? I appreciate your list a ton because it's helped me see that there's a hidden dimension that I didn't touch on in my definition above, and that's a "socially-determined potential." Perhaps a simpler definition of ambition we can arrive at is, "How duty-bound do you feel to fulfilling your socially-determined potential?" If everyone around you has always said you'd be great, how important is it to you to prove them right? I think ambition, as I've written about it here, is potentially about the confluence of these two factors: 1. That other people think you're doing to do great things and 2. That you feel it's your duty to do great things as well.
(I've got to run to a meeting -- I'll post this now and write back to the rest later.)
Part 2: After I sent my first comment you texted me about the two different definitions of ambition (woe the conversation happening across two platforms, one public one private!) -- and your question here, "hould we aim to be as "ambitious" as possible within our respective domains?" seems to pertain more to the first one, which I'd summarize roughly as "aiming to do things well."
To speak on this briefly even though it's not what the essay is about, I think aiming to do things well can be one extremely reliable source of human joy... but it has to be sincere, and devoid of secret primary desires (like if I do this well, X person will love me). But I'm not sure muddying it by saying we "ought to" want to do things well is very useful, because wanting to do things well becomes more valuable the more pure it is... if that makes sense!
Finally... I understand that it may seem odd to have me, someone writing a Substack and building an audience for her work, telling people that it's okay to squander their potential. But the truth is, I DO feel like someone who has squandered hers, even if in a limited sense that I'm forgoing a certain set of key, institutional markers of success that would be possible for me to achieve. I'm not sure my being a good writer makes me ambitious, just as I wouldn't call someone ambitious for being particularly good at soccer. Maybe that's difficult to see because we live in an age in which writing -- and on THIS platform in particular, Substack -- is so twisted up with striving, and VC fundraising, and "brand-building."
PS Final note on this. I admit that "Go Ahead, Squander Your Potential" is at least a partially misleading title for this essay... because the real thesis isn't that it's always okay and fine to squander your potential :P The real thesis is that it's a basic political agency to be able to destroy yourself, and squander your potential -- so as much as you love your potential and feel a duty to fulfill it, remember that sometimes your deeper moral duty may ask you to squander it.
I enjoyed this, so nicely said - I relate. I pursued self growth, therapy, getting the PhD and beyond, through some pretty crazy years of crushing and longing for passionate connections almost obsessively - ok, very obsessively at times.
What I arrived at personally has a foot on both sides of the line, meaning - it meant everything to me to understand what I was capable of, and that filled up my longing for some level of self-actualisation that was very real and important to me. To be honest, and I’m not saying it’s healthy or ideal, but I hated myself for ‘squandering’ my 20s and loved that I got my shit together from my 30s and beyond.
All that being said, the longing to self-actualise doesn’t for most of us replace the longing for passionate connection to others. Most people experience longing for both - to be, and to be with.
Having one makes not having the other easier to bear. Also, I found that working on my own stuff was a fabulous distraction from yearning for the much desired other.
In short, pursue the various yearnings is my solution. Squander some time if you wish, then go again. You write beautifully. Doesn’t seem like you’re squandering much at all. X
I appreciate this very much! My real-world ambition is a bit dormant these days, but I've had so much desire to connect with others; to see and be seen, to be embedded in community. It has helped me as well to realize these are simply different desires -- and they aren't always hiding in each other.
"I think it is sometimes very important to squander one’s own potential. Sometimes, the courage to destroy oneself is the only political agency one has — and it is only upon this courage that new worlds can possibly be made."
Well, that one got a giant, out loud 'oof' of recognition. Yes. Yes. And a little more yes.
your writing is so rich. Thank you thank you thank you for this reflection. " Sometimes, the courage to destroy oneself is the only political agency one has" was especially powerful
I loved this essay! Fittingly I was just recently introduced to this idea that people we have a crush on are actually misplaced ambitions. I recently read “Bittersweet” by Susan Cain where she shares a similar story. She once dated a musician/ writer and was obsessed with him. After months of hearing about it, her friend confronted her with this question: “what are YOU longing for?” It was clear to her friend that this obsession was covering something else. And in this case the friend was right: Susan Cain was secretly longing for a life as a writer... she wanted to be LIKE him, not WITH him. She then broke up with the guy and started her own creative journey.
I understand that isn’t always the case - sometimes we simply crush or fall in love and there’s no hidden ambition... but as I look back on my experiences, more often than not it’s been true for me. Not just of people I’ve dated but also people I’ve be-friended or worked with. To me it also ties to being a “shadow artist” (recently wrote it about in my Substack). Hiding behind people whom we secretly want to be like (or ARE like but too afraid to show it).
I also totally agree with you and this obsession of constantly “bettering” ourselves. The self-help / self-care industry is still booming! The road to self-improvement is endless and honestly exhausting. I’ve done the merry-go round of yoga, plant medicine, silent meditation retreats etc. And some of it has indeed been incredible. But it can become its own trap and escapism (hello spiritual bypass!). I don’t know if it’s age but lately I’ve been shifting away from “self-improvement” towards more self-acceptance. My new motto is: Fuck it, I’m human.
Ps: for Adele, it seems like everyone who moves to LA switches from “tears to sweat” 😆
Great point, my wife and I were discussing this exact idea. And the selection bias here on the interwebs is massive!
I often see folks in social media being like, “Howdy, a while back I shocked everyone by whiting X ambitious thing. But it’s all worth it cuz now I am grinding on Y thing!” 😝
What does it mean to squander your life, not on another endeavor, but on rest or simply being?
The desire to be with someone can be confused with the desire to be someone, and exploring that is fruitful. But it seems like a faulty leap of logic to recognize this confusion and advise that any crush should be transformed into a personal ambition. If my crush has attributes I aspire to and I want to be with them, then I say do both.
Dating a musician has opened up a new world of music for me, and made me want to be a musician. Realizing that, I ran towards him with questions: can we practice together? how did you learn? what are you listening to? how do I develop my own sound? I have developed my musician-self in a deep and meaningful way with the aid of my crush. It's become a foundation of our relationship, and it feels solid. It reminds me of a quote about love, that a relationship is looking outward in the same direction. If you are both looking to develop a certain quality, why not do it together?
I love this, and it's a beautiful alternative to the either-or. I think you are right -- and perhaps there is always a healthy, real element of love that IS about wanting to be like someone, a little. Why not pursue that together, instead of seeing it as permission to run off on a self-development journey of your own? :P
Another thought: What leads us to drop out; to quit the game? I think when I left the corporate engineering world it was in part because my values lay very much in the big-picture, "wait, what are we actually accomplishing here?" camp and less so in the "am I finding approval and a sense of meaning/belonging among other 'gamers'" camp. Widening the cracks in the wall could look like helping others come to value the big picture, too. How brief and absurd our lives are; how rapidly the clock is ticking to save the planet; all the things we and others have sacrificed so that we can live comfortable modern lives.
Someday the floodgates will open and it will be much easier for all of us to follow the wagging tail of our ambition down less conventional and anticapitalist paths, finding meaning and belonging and comfort in those choices the same way we find these things today by accepting the rotten game of capitalist modernity.
Your last lines about rejecting society's definitions of productivity, progress, and growth is the key point to me, and I wish you had spent a little more time on it! :D I feel that personal growth and fulfilling our potential are part of a healthy, satisfying life. It's the "self actualization" at the top of Maslow's pyramid. It's a central goal of generations of freedom-loving leftists, fighting to end oppression and dismantle hierarchy. I don't want to denounce this striving; I want us to engage in it conscientiously. Rather than our ambition allowing us to be used by the psychopathic capitalist machine for its own gain, I want us to step back and exchange smirks, or squirm in dawning horror at one another, passengers and flight attendants alike, all realizing together that we are using our ambition to play a giant and devastating game. I want us to think long and hard about why we're playing the game, what's really worth pursuing, and what brilliant imagination we might cultivate together in the process of making a newer and actually humane game.
I love the sentiment of this but I also think there's another discussion to be had here around what happens when we abandon the games we've collectively built as a society, because YES, it's natural and healthy to strive for personal growth and potential-fulfilling outside of a societal framework (like capitalism) but it's VERY DIFFERENT to do so without the bolstering of community, society, family, etc.
As I know you know very well, to play new games, we need new peers, and the cultivation of those alternative networks of folks who want to play new games... is maybe MORE of the work of striving differently than we like to think!
Your language about the importance of squandering our potential, and of exercising the courage to destroy ourselves, reminds me of ownership vs. usufruct a la the Wrong Boys and Library Socialism (see link below). Owning an object means having the right to destroy it. Usufruct is the right to use the object, up to but excluding the object's destruction. I think a society built around usufruct rather than private ownership, at least for all the common necessities and luxuries of life (keep your hands off my handmade gifts and family heirlooms :P) would be a beautiful thing.
The idea of having, and defiantly exercising, the ability to destroy ourselves is helping me grasp our role in our current capitalist society more deeply. We are the objects, and we are owned. We can be used up completely and destroyed. It is often in the economic interest to do so, in fact, when great swaths of us are no longer needed for our labor (globalization, automation) but can still turn a profit by rotting away in a prison cell or, after losing our health at work, being drugged into oblivion with prescription opiates. To assert our own powers of self-destruction/self-sacrifice is a way of asserting our independence from the system, as feeble as we may otherwise seem. This was at the heart of Gandhi's satyagraha.
I want to live in a world where we are the only ones with the power to destroy or sacrifice ourselves and where we cease to wield this power over non-human animals, too. An usufruct for living beings. Society would need to be structured to meet everyone's basic needs; no one could be allowed to become desperate for survival or health, because this desperation is the baton by which our current society does its beating.
This is so lovely! I think you are right that in general we think of OURSELVES through the lens of usufruct right now (because I don't really belong to me, I belong to my boss, or my family, or society) but we think of much ELSE in terms of ownership (the animals that become our food, the planet we live on). What would it be like to reclaim our ability to DEEPLY own ourselves -- up to and including destroying ourselves -- and to withdraw our sense of ownership from things whose autonomy we respect and honor?
And you are totally right about the connection with satyagraha, that's exactly it.
Wow! This essay speaks to me on so many levels, I don’t even know where to start.
1. The idea that crushes are just misplaced ambition is something I hadn’t heard before. How quaint.
2. I too have an ambivalent relationship with ambition. Having been raised by an ambitious, accomplished woman and gone on to pursue the same profession as her, I’ve been haunted by her shadow. Moreover, these days, it seems like many people in the legal profession are the same as she, goal-oriented, well-organized individuals who think only of the future. I’ve always felt like that kind of ambition is only one part of a much larger story. Thanks for giving voice to my thoughts!
3. Wait, there’s such a thing as safety instruction videos??? I don’t think I’ve ever been on a flight where there wasn’t a live demonstration by a flight attendant. Admittedly, we’re talking Europe.
I am so curious to know how you would define the word "ambition"!! It feels like a super complicated idea that could easily have multiple essays of its own. Here are some things that could be conceived of as "ambitious"—where do they fall in your framework?
- Running for a powerful political office
- Starting a nonprofit that delivers vaccines to underserved populations
- Labouring away for 20 years to solve a difficult niche problem in mathematics that will be appreciated by only a small handful of people
- Writing and performing music simply for the joy of it, finding a huge fanbase online, and achieving great commercial success
- Raising a family of 6
Perhaps another angle on this question is: is there an ambitious and unambitious way to do every task? You can be a political organizer with great ambition who strives to make mass systemic change, or one who shows up to your local chapter, does an honest day's work and goes home. So, too, with being a musician, or parent, or scientist. The question your essay made me think of is: should we aim to be as "ambitious" as possible within our respective domains?
One more thing: Even Oppen ended up writing a book that won the Pulitzer Prize. Wouldn't the real unambitious thing be to stop writing poetry altogether and just enjoy spending time with family and friends and maybe show up to the occasional labour protest? Can an unambitious person have a Wikipedia page?
I've been speaking frequently with David about this idea that sometimes, the best wisdom for how to live is only shared in contexts where it cannot be broadcast widely. For instance, wisdom like "get off social media and live without an audience" is unlikely to be spoken on Twitter or Instagram. And even when public figures do say it, can you actually believe them? They are speaking to an audience, after all, thereby contradicting their own message.
Perhaps the advice to forgo one's ambition is the same. It feels suspicious coming from someone like George Oppen, or, indeed, from you, Michelle, both of whom I view as performing at the highest levels of their craft. I feel that perhaps I could only truly internalize the dictum "it's ok to squander your ambition" coming from someone of immense promise who forwent all opportunities for success in order to sit by the fire with their grandchildren—precisely the person who would never write a blog post or tweet or write a book in the first place.
Hi Matty :-) I'm finally getting to this. So. I'm going to write a definition "blind," just off the top of my own head, and then go through your list and see if that definition changes.
At this time, and thinking about what I meant when I wrote this essay, I think of ambition as "striving for an externally verifiable position/situation/state of affairs that can be ascribed to the greatness of the self." I think there are two parts to it -- the first is that it's externally verifiable, so being hired at X company could count, but "being happy inside" might not UNLESS you go to great lengths to prove it on social media, etc. And the second part is that the narrative you tell of this achievement returns back to the self: *I* did this. I know both of these things can be easily fuzzy, and often futzed with, so in practice what I think I was writing about was an ethos -- and I was doing my best to pin down that ethos, because the real answer is, "I know it when I'm around ambitious people because I feel it in my gut." (It has something to do with the way I've been approached in conversation... as though the conversation is constantly being mined for insights... the hungry eyes...)
Let's use your list.
- Running for a powerful political office -- This seems pretty ambitious in most cases.
- Starting a nonprofit that delivers vaccines to underserved populations -- This COULD be ambitious if done in a way that is loud and self aggrandizing, but it could also NOT be ambitious. I guess it depends on the "felt potential" of the person who does this, because if this is someone who everyone is saying could otherwise be President, then it's not ambitious at all. Maybe that introduces something new here, the sense of a person's potential. (It's also "ambitious" in another sense in that there are likely to be huge cultural and political barriers to doing this, and so in a way, this is just a difficult thing to do. But just because something is difficult, doesn't mean it's ambitious.)
- Labouring away for 20 years to solve a difficult niche problem in mathematics that will be appreciated by only a small handful of people -- TBH, I personally don't think this is very ambitious in the sense that I meant in the essay. It's of course intellectually ambitious, but because it's niche and doesn't lead to widespread acknowledgement, I don't think this is what I meant.
- Writing and performing music simply for the joy of it, finding a huge fanbase online, and achieving great commercial success -- This sounds lovely! I don't think it's ambitious because the public rewards seem almost accidental.
- Raising a family of 6 -- So, I would colloquially use the word "ambitious" to describe this, just because it seems challenging, but I would not use the word "ambitious" as I meant it *in this essay.*
So... where are we at? I appreciate your list a ton because it's helped me see that there's a hidden dimension that I didn't touch on in my definition above, and that's a "socially-determined potential." Perhaps a simpler definition of ambition we can arrive at is, "How duty-bound do you feel to fulfilling your socially-determined potential?" If everyone around you has always said you'd be great, how important is it to you to prove them right? I think ambition, as I've written about it here, is potentially about the confluence of these two factors: 1. That other people think you're doing to do great things and 2. That you feel it's your duty to do great things as well.
(I've got to run to a meeting -- I'll post this now and write back to the rest later.)
Part 2: After I sent my first comment you texted me about the two different definitions of ambition (woe the conversation happening across two platforms, one public one private!) -- and your question here, "hould we aim to be as "ambitious" as possible within our respective domains?" seems to pertain more to the first one, which I'd summarize roughly as "aiming to do things well."
To speak on this briefly even though it's not what the essay is about, I think aiming to do things well can be one extremely reliable source of human joy... but it has to be sincere, and devoid of secret primary desires (like if I do this well, X person will love me). But I'm not sure muddying it by saying we "ought to" want to do things well is very useful, because wanting to do things well becomes more valuable the more pure it is... if that makes sense!
Finally... I understand that it may seem odd to have me, someone writing a Substack and building an audience for her work, telling people that it's okay to squander their potential. But the truth is, I DO feel like someone who has squandered hers, even if in a limited sense that I'm forgoing a certain set of key, institutional markers of success that would be possible for me to achieve. I'm not sure my being a good writer makes me ambitious, just as I wouldn't call someone ambitious for being particularly good at soccer. Maybe that's difficult to see because we live in an age in which writing -- and on THIS platform in particular, Substack -- is so twisted up with striving, and VC fundraising, and "brand-building."
PS Final note on this. I admit that "Go Ahead, Squander Your Potential" is at least a partially misleading title for this essay... because the real thesis isn't that it's always okay and fine to squander your potential :P The real thesis is that it's a basic political agency to be able to destroy yourself, and squander your potential -- so as much as you love your potential and feel a duty to fulfill it, remember that sometimes your deeper moral duty may ask you to squander it.
I enjoyed this, so nicely said - I relate. I pursued self growth, therapy, getting the PhD and beyond, through some pretty crazy years of crushing and longing for passionate connections almost obsessively - ok, very obsessively at times.
What I arrived at personally has a foot on both sides of the line, meaning - it meant everything to me to understand what I was capable of, and that filled up my longing for some level of self-actualisation that was very real and important to me. To be honest, and I’m not saying it’s healthy or ideal, but I hated myself for ‘squandering’ my 20s and loved that I got my shit together from my 30s and beyond.
All that being said, the longing to self-actualise doesn’t for most of us replace the longing for passionate connection to others. Most people experience longing for both - to be, and to be with.
Having one makes not having the other easier to bear. Also, I found that working on my own stuff was a fabulous distraction from yearning for the much desired other.
In short, pursue the various yearnings is my solution. Squander some time if you wish, then go again. You write beautifully. Doesn’t seem like you’re squandering much at all. X
I appreciate this very much! My real-world ambition is a bit dormant these days, but I've had so much desire to connect with others; to see and be seen, to be embedded in community. It has helped me as well to realize these are simply different desires -- and they aren't always hiding in each other.
"Pursue the various yearnings" is lovely!!!
Yessss! It’s all in balancing the paradox! 🙌
"I think it is sometimes very important to squander one’s own potential. Sometimes, the courage to destroy oneself is the only political agency one has — and it is only upon this courage that new worlds can possibly be made."
Well, that one got a giant, out loud 'oof' of recognition. Yes. Yes. And a little more yes.
your writing is so rich. Thank you thank you thank you for this reflection. " Sometimes, the courage to destroy oneself is the only political agency one has" was especially powerful
I loved this essay! Fittingly I was just recently introduced to this idea that people we have a crush on are actually misplaced ambitions. I recently read “Bittersweet” by Susan Cain where she shares a similar story. She once dated a musician/ writer and was obsessed with him. After months of hearing about it, her friend confronted her with this question: “what are YOU longing for?” It was clear to her friend that this obsession was covering something else. And in this case the friend was right: Susan Cain was secretly longing for a life as a writer... she wanted to be LIKE him, not WITH him. She then broke up with the guy and started her own creative journey.
I understand that isn’t always the case - sometimes we simply crush or fall in love and there’s no hidden ambition... but as I look back on my experiences, more often than not it’s been true for me. Not just of people I’ve dated but also people I’ve be-friended or worked with. To me it also ties to being a “shadow artist” (recently wrote it about in my Substack). Hiding behind people whom we secretly want to be like (or ARE like but too afraid to show it).
I also totally agree with you and this obsession of constantly “bettering” ourselves. The self-help / self-care industry is still booming! The road to self-improvement is endless and honestly exhausting. I’ve done the merry-go round of yoga, plant medicine, silent meditation retreats etc. And some of it has indeed been incredible. But it can become its own trap and escapism (hello spiritual bypass!). I don’t know if it’s age but lately I’ve been shifting away from “self-improvement” towards more self-acceptance. My new motto is: Fuck it, I’m human.
Ps: for Adele, it seems like everyone who moves to LA switches from “tears to sweat” 😆
Great point, my wife and I were discussing this exact idea. And the selection bias here on the interwebs is massive!
I often see folks in social media being like, “Howdy, a while back I shocked everyone by whiting X ambitious thing. But it’s all worth it cuz now I am grinding on Y thing!” 😝
What does it mean to squander your life, not on another endeavor, but on rest or simply being?
Yes! Exactly! Going from X ambition to Y grind is no longer #goals for me. Wishing you (and your wife) a wonderful 2023 full of rest and BEING!
The desire to be with someone can be confused with the desire to be someone, and exploring that is fruitful. But it seems like a faulty leap of logic to recognize this confusion and advise that any crush should be transformed into a personal ambition. If my crush has attributes I aspire to and I want to be with them, then I say do both.
Dating a musician has opened up a new world of music for me, and made me want to be a musician. Realizing that, I ran towards him with questions: can we practice together? how did you learn? what are you listening to? how do I develop my own sound? I have developed my musician-self in a deep and meaningful way with the aid of my crush. It's become a foundation of our relationship, and it feels solid. It reminds me of a quote about love, that a relationship is looking outward in the same direction. If you are both looking to develop a certain quality, why not do it together?
I love this, and it's a beautiful alternative to the either-or. I think you are right -- and perhaps there is always a healthy, real element of love that IS about wanting to be like someone, a little. Why not pursue that together, instead of seeing it as permission to run off on a self-development journey of your own? :P
Another thought: What leads us to drop out; to quit the game? I think when I left the corporate engineering world it was in part because my values lay very much in the big-picture, "wait, what are we actually accomplishing here?" camp and less so in the "am I finding approval and a sense of meaning/belonging among other 'gamers'" camp. Widening the cracks in the wall could look like helping others come to value the big picture, too. How brief and absurd our lives are; how rapidly the clock is ticking to save the planet; all the things we and others have sacrificed so that we can live comfortable modern lives.
Someday the floodgates will open and it will be much easier for all of us to follow the wagging tail of our ambition down less conventional and anticapitalist paths, finding meaning and belonging and comfort in those choices the same way we find these things today by accepting the rotten game of capitalist modernity.
I'd love to see or write a catalogue one day of reasons folks "drop out," or "quit the game." A catalogue of cracks!
A crack map!
(I bet it will be so popular even the DEA will get excited about it, haha)
Your last lines about rejecting society's definitions of productivity, progress, and growth is the key point to me, and I wish you had spent a little more time on it! :D I feel that personal growth and fulfilling our potential are part of a healthy, satisfying life. It's the "self actualization" at the top of Maslow's pyramid. It's a central goal of generations of freedom-loving leftists, fighting to end oppression and dismantle hierarchy. I don't want to denounce this striving; I want us to engage in it conscientiously. Rather than our ambition allowing us to be used by the psychopathic capitalist machine for its own gain, I want us to step back and exchange smirks, or squirm in dawning horror at one another, passengers and flight attendants alike, all realizing together that we are using our ambition to play a giant and devastating game. I want us to think long and hard about why we're playing the game, what's really worth pursuing, and what brilliant imagination we might cultivate together in the process of making a newer and actually humane game.
I love the sentiment of this but I also think there's another discussion to be had here around what happens when we abandon the games we've collectively built as a society, because YES, it's natural and healthy to strive for personal growth and potential-fulfilling outside of a societal framework (like capitalism) but it's VERY DIFFERENT to do so without the bolstering of community, society, family, etc.
As I know you know very well, to play new games, we need new peers, and the cultivation of those alternative networks of folks who want to play new games... is maybe MORE of the work of striving differently than we like to think!
Your language about the importance of squandering our potential, and of exercising the courage to destroy ourselves, reminds me of ownership vs. usufruct a la the Wrong Boys and Library Socialism (see link below). Owning an object means having the right to destroy it. Usufruct is the right to use the object, up to but excluding the object's destruction. I think a society built around usufruct rather than private ownership, at least for all the common necessities and luxuries of life (keep your hands off my handmade gifts and family heirlooms :P) would be a beautiful thing.
The idea of having, and defiantly exercising, the ability to destroy ourselves is helping me grasp our role in our current capitalist society more deeply. We are the objects, and we are owned. We can be used up completely and destroyed. It is often in the economic interest to do so, in fact, when great swaths of us are no longer needed for our labor (globalization, automation) but can still turn a profit by rotting away in a prison cell or, after losing our health at work, being drugged into oblivion with prescription opiates. To assert our own powers of self-destruction/self-sacrifice is a way of asserting our independence from the system, as feeble as we may otherwise seem. This was at the heart of Gandhi's satyagraha.
I want to live in a world where we are the only ones with the power to destroy or sacrifice ourselves and where we cease to wield this power over non-human animals, too. An usufruct for living beings. Society would need to be structured to meet everyone's basic needs; no one could be allowed to become desperate for survival or health, because this desperation is the baton by which our current society does its beating.
https://www.neweconomy.org.au/journal/issues/vol2/iss4/library-socialism/
This is so lovely! I think you are right that in general we think of OURSELVES through the lens of usufruct right now (because I don't really belong to me, I belong to my boss, or my family, or society) but we think of much ELSE in terms of ownership (the animals that become our food, the planet we live on). What would it be like to reclaim our ability to DEEPLY own ourselves -- up to and including destroying ourselves -- and to withdraw our sense of ownership from things whose autonomy we respect and honor?
And you are totally right about the connection with satyagraha, that's exactly it.
Wow! This essay speaks to me on so many levels, I don’t even know where to start.
1. The idea that crushes are just misplaced ambition is something I hadn’t heard before. How quaint.
2. I too have an ambivalent relationship with ambition. Having been raised by an ambitious, accomplished woman and gone on to pursue the same profession as her, I’ve been haunted by her shadow. Moreover, these days, it seems like many people in the legal profession are the same as she, goal-oriented, well-organized individuals who think only of the future. I’ve always felt like that kind of ambition is only one part of a much larger story. Thanks for giving voice to my thoughts!
3. Wait, there’s such a thing as safety instruction videos??? I don’t think I’ve ever been on a flight where there wasn’t a live demonstration by a flight attendant. Admittedly, we’re talking Europe.