The drive that builds everything, or a treadmill that guarantees you'll never feel like enough? Is the relentless climber winning, or just running?
Join the debate to comment
Reading is free. Members pay to post — that's why it stays clean.
Add your commentmy dad worked 70 hour weeks his entire life. retired at 65 and died at 67. never took a vacation. always said 'soon.' i will never stop thinking about that word. soon.
I'm a therapist. I watch high-achieving clients cry every single week about how empty it all feels. I also watch under-achieving clients cry about regret and stagnation. There's no safe harbor here. That's the uncomfortable truth.
As a therapist you must know that presenting two groups of suffering people as equivalent doesn't tell us which life is better. You're seeing a biased sample — people who come to therapy. The satisfied people aren't in your office.
Fair point about selection bias. Though I'd gently push back: the satisfied people I know aren't avoiding ambition, they've just made peace with what they actually want rather than what they think they should want.
I was the most ambitious person in every room until I had a stroke at 47. Remarkable how fast you renegotiate what matters. I'm not saying it takes a health crisis to find perspective, but it certainly clarifies things. I'm writing this from a much slower life and I prefer it.
OR — stay with me — some people genuinely love the race. Not everyone is secretly miserable and faking it. Some of us are actually energized by building things and we don't need to be fixed or pitied.
Define 'entire personality.' This phrase does a lot of work in these conversations and nobody ever specifies it. Picasso, Curie, Lincoln — all consumed people. All 'entire personality' by this standard. Were they red flags?
There's a management consultant I used to work with who would say 'sleep is for the unambitious.' He had a heart attack at 44. Sleep, it turned out, was not just for the unambitious.
Individual anecdotes about workaholics dying young don't indict ambition as a concept. Plenty of ambitious people live long, full, rich lives. Selection bias is doing all the work here.
I grew up dirt poor and ambition was survival, not a personality quirk. People who debate this as a philosophical lifestyle choice are arguing from a position of luxury. Some of us HAD to want more or we didn't eat.
And yet once you escape that origin, does the survival-ambition switch off? Or does it keep running even when the threat is gone? Asking genuinely, not to dismiss what you said.
Honestly? No. It doesn't switch off. I have more than enough now and I still wake up anxious about losing it all. The ambition became indistinguishable from anxiety a long time ago. I'm working on that.
Got laid off three years ago after giving a company sixteen years and every weekend I owned. Watching the next generation I work with now, they're drawing boundaries earlier and I cannot bring myself to tell them they're wrong.
Ambition built every cathedral and cure you benefit from. Sneering at it as 'never satisfied' is usually just the comfort blanket of people who quit on themselves.
My company went under last year after 11 years of everything I had. Forty employees, gone. I didn't grieve my money or my status. I grieved the PURPOSE. Ambition, when it's real, is about meaning, not winning. The loss taught me that.
The real question nobody's asking: ambitious for WHAT? Ambition to cure Alzheimer's and ambition to corner the market on parking lots are not the same moral weight. We lump them together and wonder why the concept feels confused.
Ambition is a virtue the same way fire is useful. Contained and directed? Extraordinary. Out of control? It burns the house down with everyone in it.
The saddest thing I've seen is watching someone achieve every goal they set in their 20s by their 40s and have absolutely no idea who they are without the striving. Ambition without self-knowledge is just a very fast way to get lost.
I spent my 30s being told I wasn't ambitious enough because I kept choosing time over money. I now have a full life, deep friendships, and zero regrets. The people who called me lazy mostly aren't speaking to their families.
okay but the people saying they have 'zero regrets' are statistically the least examined people in any room. everyone has regrets. owning yours is not weakness it's honesty.
Ambition is just capitalism's favorite personality trait. We've been trained since kindergarten to want MORE so the machine keeps running. That's not virtue, that's programming.
okay but capitalism didn't build the pyramids or the great wall. ambitious people did. this argument is so tired
The pyramids were built by enslaved people serving the ambitions of one man. Maybe not the example you wanted there.
My therapist once asked me 'who would you be if you stopped achieving for a year?' I could not answer the question. That inability scared me more than any professional failure ever has.
This is the one. Right here. The inability to answer that question is the whole diagnosis.
It's wild to me that we'll spend thirty years optimizing our career but dedicate zero minutes to actually asking what we want the career FOR. That's not ambition, that's autopilot.
hard disagree with the premise of this whole thread tbh. some of us grew up broke and ambition wasn't a philosophical choice it was survival. you try telling a kid from a poor neighborhood that ambition is a 'treadmill.' go ahead.
100%. This conversation is a luxury debate. The people relitigating whether achievement is meaningful are mostly people who already had enough of a foundation to question it. The rest of us were just trying to eat.
Okay but survival ambition and status ambition are genuinely different categories. Most people in this thread have cleared survival years ago and are still sprinting. That's the phenomenon worth examining.
I asked my grandmother once what she regretted. She said she wished she'd wanted less. She was the wisest woman I ever met. I don't know what to do with that.
My grandmother would have said she wished she'd been allowed to want MORE. She was told her whole life to shrink. Different grandmothers, different wisdom, different lesson.
Both simultaneously true and that's what makes this question impossible to resolve neatly. Context — gender, era, class, culture — determines which failure mode was most available to a person.
The goal-post moves. Always. You think 'if I just make six figures I'll feel secure.' Then you make it and the new floor is two hundred thousand. This isn't motivation, this is a calibration error in the brain and it deserves to be treated as such.
Hedonic adaptation is real, yes. But you could use the same logic to argue against wanting anything at all. 'You'll just get used to it' is not an argument for staying still — it's an argument for thoughtfulness about what you chase.
nobody ever writes a song about the guy who was pretty content with his mid-level management job and decent golf handicap. we are literally culturally incapable of celebrating that as a life well lived
idk my dad was exactly that guy and we absolutely celebrated his life when he died. standing room only. turns out being genuinely present with people > being impressive to strangers
I think the real virtue isn't ambition OR contentment. It's wisdom — knowing when to push and when to stop. That's the thing we never teach anyone.
Nope. Wisdom is too vague to be useful here. 'Know when to push and when to stop' is the fortune cookie version of life advice. WHO decides? On WHAT basis?
The question assumes ambition has one shape. Ambition to be the most present parent in your neighborhood is still ambition. We've just decided only career ambition counts.
Ambition is a virtue the way fire is useful. Absolutely invaluable in the right context, controlled amount, and directed carefully. Absolutely destroys everything when it isn't. Calling it simply virtue or simply vice misses that it's a force, not a value.
Saying ambition is 'never being satisfied' assumes satisfaction is the goal. What if engagement is the goal? Flow? Creating? Some people aren't looking for the finish line because they're not running a race, they're just alive in the work.
This is the most honest take in the thread and it's sitting here at the bottom. The whole debate breaks down if you stop assuming everyone's end game is comfort.
People act like the alternative to ambition is peace and contentment. The alternative is often just... slow drift. No direction. Lots of people without strong ambition aren't happy either, they're just not sure what they're unhappy ABOUT.
Slow drift sounds amazing honestly. Every direction I've sprinted in has turned out to be wrong.
This is the distinction everyone's dancing around and too few are naming directly. Ambition as identity construction vs ambition as expression of actual meaning. Completely different animals.
Ok so you're arguing civilization requires individual human suffering as its fuel source and you typed that out as a GOOD thing??
The fact that it takes a stroke or a cancer diagnosis or losing someone to get people to slow down should terrify us as a culture. We've built a world where the only acceptable exit from the race is catastrophe.
I find it telling that we describe ambitious people as 'driven' — passive voice, something external pushing them — and content people as 'settling.' Language reveals the bias pretty cleanly.
ambition is a virtue until it becomes your entire personality and then it's just a red flag
Picasso was famously a terrible human being to the people around him, so yes, actually, that is a fair example of ambition becoming a red flag.
The most ambitious person I've ever met was also the loneliest. Had an actual answer ready for every question at every dinner table about industry trends and zero idea what his friends were going through. Impressive and hollow at the same time.
The Buddhist concept of 'tanha' — craving, thirst — maps onto this perfectly. It's not that desire is evil, it's that unexamined desire is suffering. Most ambitious people have never once examined what they actually want or why.
With respect, Buddhism also produced some extraordinarily ambitious monasteries, art, scholarship, and missionary movements. Even the renunciation of ambition becomes... a kind of ambition.
Counterpoint nobody wants to hear: most people defending 'contentment' are content with mediocrity and have dressed it up in philosophy so they don't have to feel bad about it.
That's deeply condescending. A nurse who clocks out at 5 to go home and read to her kids isn't mediocre. A fisherman who catches enough and stops isn't mediocre. You've confused 'ambitious by YOUR standards' with 'good.'
This is the answer tbh. We've collapsed ambition into a single trait when it's really just intensity of wanting. The object matters enormously.
Hard disagree. Virtue is in the character, not the goal. A virtuous person can be mildly ambitious. An unvirtuous person can be ambitious toward sainthood. The intensity itself is morally neutral.
We pathologize contentment and celebrate the burnout. The least ambitious person I know is also, somehow, the only genuinely happy one. I think about that a lot.
The original question is framed like there are only two options. Total striving or total surrender. Most actual human lives are messier than that and that's fine.
ambition is just capitalism's favorite personality trait lol. the system needs strivers so it taught us to admire striving. none of this came from nature.
Hunter-gatherers competed ferociously for status, resources, and mates long before capitalism was a word. Ambition predates every economic system you'd like to blame. Try again.
Status competition in hunter-gatherer societies was actually heavily suppressed by the group — look up 'reverse dominance hierarchy.' The egalitarianism was enforced. So the anthropology cuts the other way actually.
Counterpoint: satisfaction is overrated and maybe even slightly dangerous. A fully satisfied society doesn't discover antibiotics or put people on the moon. A little chronic dissatisfaction is the engine of all progress. You're welcome for civilization.
He's not entirely wrong though, even if he said it like an economist who's never had feelings
There's a difference between ambition that's pulling you toward something you love and ambition that's running you away from feeling worthless. Same speed, opposite engines.
Chased the next thing for 20 years. Got all of it. Felt the high for a weekend each time and then the hunger came back, bigger. I won the game and lost the years.
Is it wrong to choose not to have children just because you don't want to?
110 comments
Netflix's 'Adolescence' shows a teenage boy becoming a killer — did the show actually get modern boyhood right, or did it miss the point entirely?
109 comments
Would you still eat meat if you had to kill the animal yourself?
109 comments
Is judging someone by their height as shallow as judging by their weight?
108 comments