A Note on Ambition

To anyone currently being eaten by the thing they were meant to be feeding.

There is a small distinction worth holding in mind, particularly if you are reading this somewhere between nine in the evening and one in the morning, with the day's last email still open in a tab you are not yet ready to close. The distinction is between ambition that is building you a life and ambition that is quietly eating the one you already have. I have been thinking about the difference for some time now, partly because I keep meeting people who can no longer tell which one they are inside, and partly because I am not always entirely confident I can tell which one I am inside either, which is precisely the kind of thing one notices about ambition once one has been paying close attention to it for long enough.

The version that builds you a life tends to be slightly boring to talk about at dinner parties. It produces results that arrive on a timeline somebody outside your nervous system could draw on a chart, and it tends to leave you, at the end of any given week, recognisably the same person who started the week, with perhaps a small accumulation of work completed and a small clarification of what the next week ought to contain. It is not glamorous. It does not produce the kind of stories people tell about themselves on podcasts. It is, in essence, the slow construction of a life that gets to be lived rather than survived, which is a project so quietly important that almost nobody describes themselves as engaged in it, because describing oneself as engaged in it would feel oddly small compared to the more dramatic ambitions one is supposed to be having.

The version that consumes you is considerably more exciting to be inside, which is part of why it is so difficult to notice. It produces the daily sensation of being on the edge of something significant, which feels meaningfully different from the daily sensation of slowly building something significant, although the two are easily confused from the inside if you have not previously had the opportunity to compare them carefully. The consuming version produces the late-night working that feels heroic until you find yourself, with mild surprise, having had no genuine conversation with the people you love for somewhere between six and eleven days. It produces the cancelled plans that are always for the right reasons, the holiday rescheduled twice, the moment when you realise you have not actually read a book that was not directly relevant to work in several years, although you continue to describe yourself, with no apparent embarrassment, as someone who loves to read.

The trick of the consuming version, the thing that makes it so reliably difficult to spot, is that it presents itself wearing the same clothes as the building version. The early mornings look identical from outside. The relentless attention to the work, the willingness to defer pleasure for the project, the high tolerance for tedium that the work requires. These are virtues. They were virtues in the building version too. The difference is not visible at the level of the behaviour. It is visible at the level of what the behaviour is producing across years, and you can only see it if you are willing to look up from the work for long enough to notice whether the life you are building inside the work is one you would actually want to find yourself living in. Most people I know who are currently being consumed by their ambition would not stop to ask this question, partly because they are too busy, and partly because they suspect, at some level they are not yet ready to articulate, that they would not like the answer.

There are, in case anyone is keeping score, a small number of warning signs worth knowing about. The friends you have not spoken to in months who used to be the friends you spoke to weekly. The exercise habit that disappeared somewhere around the third quarter of last year and that you keep telling yourself you will pick back up the moment things calm down, although things have not calmed down for somewhere between two and seven years and there is no particular reason to believe they are about to. The persistent low-grade exhaustion that you have stopped describing as exhaustion because exhaustion has become the baseline against which other states are measured. The Sunday evening dread that you have started experiencing on Saturday afternoon, which is the kind of small temporal creep that should alarm anyone but which generally goes unremarked because everyone you know is experiencing it too. The way you no longer reliably remember what you used to enjoy doing, which is the symptom most people only notice retrospectively, usually in the middle of a holiday they did not particularly want to take, when their nervous system finally relaxes enough to register the absence of whatever it used to enjoy.

If you are reading this and recognising more than two of those, I do not particularly want to scare you, partly because scaring people is rude and partly because the scared response tends to produce the worst possible reaction, which is to ambitiously redouble one's commitment to the very thing that has been doing the consuming, on the grounds that one ought to be ambitious about one's recovery from ambition as well. This is, you will notice, the consuming version of ambition reasserting itself in slightly different clothes, and it is remarkably effective at convincing the person inside it that they are now finally addressing the problem, when in fact they are simply continuing the problem with a small change of vocabulary.

What I have observed, across the people I know who have managed to step from the consuming version back to the building version, is that the move is rarely produced by a dramatic decision. It is produced by a small sequence of unspectacular ones. The Saturday morning kept clear of work. The weekly conversation with the person they used to speak to weekly. The book that has nothing to do with anything. The thirty minutes of exercise that was previously held to a higher productivity standard than was reasonable. None of these decisions feels like the answer at the moment of making it, which is part of why so few people make them. They feel like small accommodations to a life one is not entirely living, rather than like the actual mechanism through which that life is recovered. The accommodations turn out to be the recovery, although this is rarely visible until somewhere around the third or fourth month of having made them.

There is also, and I say this with some affection, a particular category of person who reads everything I have written above, recognises themselves in it precisely, and then immediately constructs an internal argument for why their own situation is the exception, on grounds that are usually very specific and almost always somewhat creative. The business is at a particular stage that requires this. The next six months are different. The opportunity will not exist again. The team genuinely needs them in a way the team does not need anyone else. These arguments are not exactly wrong. They are simply the arguments one is required to make in order to continue inside the consuming version of ambition without having to look at it directly, and they are produced by the same mind that the ambition is currently eating, which is why they sound so reassuring from inside and so familiar from outside.

I do not have a particular prescription to offer at the end of this, because prescriptions arrive at the close of pieces like this in ways that suggest the writer has the answer and is now generously sharing it, and I am not entirely sure I am inside the building version of ambition myself often enough to be confidently distributing advice on the matter. I am, however, fairly certain that the question is worth asking yourself with some regularity, ideally at a moment when you are not currently in the middle of being consumed, on the grounds that one cannot reliably assess the temperature of the water from inside the pot. The question, in case it is useful to have it in one place, is whether the ambition you are currently inside is building you a life or eating the one you have. The answer will not arrive immediately. It tends to arrive somewhere between thirty seconds and three days after the question has been honestly posed, which is generally how long it takes for the mind that has been doing the consuming to give up its first round of objections and let the honest answer come through.

Whatever the answer turns out to be, I hope it produces the small course correction that brings you closer to a life that gets to be lived rather than survived. The world contains an enormous amount of ambition currently in the consuming phase, and the small contribution any one of us can make to changing the balance is the contribution of declining, where possible, to add to it. I am, in case it is useful to mention, holding myself to the same standard, with imperfect success and with the affectionate company of several people who have known me long enough to tell me when I am drifting back into the consuming version. May you have similar company, and may you listen to them when they tell you.

Yours,

Nandita