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.
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 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” 😆
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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” 😆
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?
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.
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/