What a great and thoughtful response. I really believe too many people — some very ambitious and successful — are being driven by unexamined pathology. I've seen too many examples of people who achieve their goals in terms of money or career or prestige or knowledge and remain miserable because they never took the time to ask themselves these questions.
Why is anyone being bothered with their personal degree of ambitiousness? Is it really a bad thing that you don't really desire to be rich or powerful? Is it bad if people are already happy with what they have?
As opposed to the rest that are miserable without getting the prestige? Everyone is motivated by fears, insecurities, wanting respect of peers, etc. Painting this all as mental illness is a bit stretched.
People do stuff and then they die, so try to have fun, do stuff that you want to do and don't worry so much about what mysterious voodoo motivates what you do, who cares?
If you make 10 people's lives better throughout your life, and you did that because of some childhood trauma that motivates you to be a savior or to get approval, who gives a shit? You still helped them.
Alright. Another person comes to you and says, the larger societal problem is that ambitious people will ignore or put up with a world of shit as long as they get what they are after.
Who's right?
To elaborate - Salma's ambition was to make the movie, she could've quit 100 times, but instead she put up with 100 cases of sexual harassment (100 being an artbirary large number here)
Harvey's ambition was to have sexual relations with every woman that needed him to do something for her, that he found attractive. He ignored everyone else's needs but his own in the process of fulfilling his ambition.
Seeing it from the angle of ambition, both people could've done things differently but didn't, because they were preoccupied with achieving their goals, more than achieving let's say... harmony in themselves and the world... Is that the larger societal problem? That our ambitions are small and selfish?
I'm not saying the person is not part of an elite. I'm saying his problem is quite common, and has little to do with him being part of an elite. Yes, he could realize that he is in a good position, and it's not a big deal if his startup fails, and he can always get a decent paying job.
But he may well have the same problems in that job (not always as severe, but sometimes it can be). He may well have the same problems in a crappy job. That's why it's not a first world problem. It's convenient to believe that he causes his own problems by chasing wealth, but it's a flawed to think he would avoid them had he not gone that path. Not processing emotions well is not something unique to people who are in the elite. And not trying to get filthy rich will not cure your problem.
I view it very similar to physical ailments. It's a problem, and one needs a cure/salve. I don't couple it with one's behavior/motives/aspirations.
On the other hand, why do so many highly skilled people push themselves so hard? I do not have any stats, it's just an observation looking at all the people in my environment, and then some public exponents.
I've grown up in a family where there was always enough, yet not much in excess. Most grown up people I knew in my childhood would probably complain that they would want more, yet they mostly just did their job, had enough and enjoyed their family life.
That is also true for some of the people I later met at university and then in business, but I get the impression that quite a lot of them, even though they have much better jobs than the people from my childhood, invest a lot of their free time trying to pursue their goal. And it is extremely rare that I see someone actually reaching it. It is far more often that their life becomes a lot more miserable, think divorce or similar.
Now don't ge me wrong, I think pursuing ones goals can be extremely valuable. But for a lot of people, pursuing a goal and trying to be productive with it while at the same time being married, raising kids, earning money, staying healthy and doing chores is most likely not going to lead anywhere good. So why is it so hard for smart people to accept that fact, and enjoy one or two hours of lazyness every day? Why do people take Elon Musk as an example, if even he himself decribes his life as not too nice?
The reason for anything large and complicated is very nuanced and probably has a lot of small causes that we might all disagree on, but I'd say that the overarching reason for this social malaise might be that a lot of people are feeling a lack of hope for their future.
If you think you're working towards something good: a family, home ownership, kids, a reasonable amount of life enjoyment in terms of leisure, a stable society, and a pleasant retirement where you can enjoy seeing your grandkids and participate in some hobbies for a decade or so before your mind or body collapse....you might be willing to push yourself to achieve as much as you possibly can, even if you're a lowly cashier or janitor.
But who wants to go the extra mile for this degenerate and hopeless society where your money is being destroyed and you have grave concerns about many things? Whether rightly or wrongly, everybody is seeing fucked up things in the world and many people are feeling much greater concern about the future than we've ever seen before. This isn't a recipe for going the extra mile at work or harnessing the energy of society to achieve something great.
This seems to be a major epidemic nowadays. I suspect that mechanistic, meaningless, purely mimetic pursuit of success has some pretty negative consequences on society. I suspect it might explain why so many people are interested in engaging in politics (or company politics) and zero-sum value extraction schemes instead of just adding value... They're not interested in the process at all, only in the outcome; financial success and social approval from authority figures.
Many people are spending most of their lives doing stuff that they don't want to do, so of course they tend to look for shortcuts instead of trying to do things the right way. They have no intrinsic pride in the work they do; it's all about status, money and power. As people have become more free in their personal lives, on the career-side, we've never been so constrained.
> we start to believe that we are not by default worthy of living a good, joyful, care-free, abundant life.. unless it is "deserved".
That may be your own personal motivation, but it is far from a generalization or even shared by many people.
For instance, people do work to make a living. For some people, making a living means paying the rent and put food on the table. For others, it means affording luxuries and materialist goals. Most people do need to work to cover these expenses, and the higher they cost the harder they need to work for them. This is the norm.
Then there are also other motivations. Some people decide to become entrepreneurs not because they seek riches, but because they believe they are able to create something new, something that no one else can provide, and believe that they have an obligation to be a source of progress and push the world forward in their own personal way.
It is not just the drive for success; it is the entire culture in general. The system is built to reduce happiness, because a happy and content person has less impetus to contribute to the economy. This is actually very intentional; see for example Alan Greenspan's speech to Congress: when he was questioned about job insecurity among the population, he replied that it was a good thing because it made people work harder.
On the other hand, the ideal person for the economy (on average, forgetting outliers like inventors) is a psychopath with a penchant for conspicuous consumption. Such a person is geographically mobile, able to dedicate his life to attaining wealth and power, and is also incapable of happiness. The normal among us, unfortunately, have to try live up to that ideal. Therefore, you see people spending very little time with their families, trying to earn more and more just to satisfy their need to consume. That is stressful! This is a form of mental sickness.
Shrug. You say "inner drive for success beyond financial security", I say "deep-rooted psychological issues and pathological desire to be seen as better than everybody else".
I personally love your take. I don't know about this person, but it resonates with me. Especially the part about treating life as a game or competition and the only success metric is work/money/power. I'm by no means a lost cause, but I dabble in that game more than I want to. Or, I should say, I assign too much self worth around those metrics.
Also, one alternative is people not striving to succeed and then being depressed about not having achieved anything, relatively. Or perhaps there is a middle where everyone is happy being average like everyone else.
That said, if there is an uptick in this symptom of society at large, society should try to figure out the cause and then decide if this is a deal we're willing to make.
Maybe its not so much that nobody learns, but that its something that is generally best learned through experience. Its hard to self assess and self deception is easy. So society keeps repeating the same mistakes, even though those who have experienced and learned from it are actually talking about it.
To me it seems much more like a societal/systemic problem - one that will not be easy to fix, especially with the increasing inequality and rise of automation. The demand for achievement and lifestyle upheld by society as something worthwhile to strive for (for happiness, fulfilment, recognition etc), just perpetuates the cycle and will be become harder to attain.
What are those to think/do who did not reach what society taught them they should want and have to be happy and fulfilled? These people put the effort in, but get nothing back. They get burnt out and depressed and even though they later talk about it, others cant understand as they don't have perspective and/or don't think it will happen to them. They are too busy burning themselves out chasing the goal.
I don't think there is a solution that doesn't involve a radical shift in society and work/life balance.
It's funny that you think a lifestyle is immoral if it doesn't accomplish its own "internal goals." I think that's wrong, and not just in pathological cases. I might be an ultracompetitive misanthrope who lives to be on top (gordon-gecko-ish capitalist). But the way I get there (startup? investing?) might end up helping lots of people; maybe helping them surpass me. Was I immoral, because I didn't accomplish my goal to be number one? I'd rather have more of those people than more couch potatoes complaining about the immorality of powerful people.
Anthony Bourdain committed suicide despite a wildly financially successful and engaging life. I hear constant anecdotes about how messed up (drug use, suicide, etc) the children of rich people are.
At the end of the day we're all going up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and as you get closer to the top you start freaking out about existential stuff the same way people working the bottom freak out about physical necessities. If you started out fairly close to the top (i.e. born to the upper middle-class, like many Googlers) then that existential stuff is likely the only type of challenge that's ever consistently existed in your life, which gives it even more weight. So you focus on it and don't appreciate the benefits of being a Googler. That's just expected after a while.
It's not all decadence though, in my experience a lot of people who had to rise from humbler origins are actually held back by their relative conservatism; they stop improving at a certain point because they don't prioritize the existential stuff as much. I work with some engineers hailing from blue-collar backgrounds who give me weird looks when I tell them about my side projects, they're shocked I mess around with tech outside of work. Why would I want to do work when I don't have to? How is it fun? It's like I told them I was mining coal in my backyard. As a result I sometimes know things about their work that, despite their fundamental competence, they never learned.
Plus, we need people to agonize about the existential stuff (although perhaps in a more coherent manner than this article). If everyone was satisfied with basic material needs things like sexism and racial discrimination would never get addressed (What do you care you didn't get that job you wanted? You still have a roof over your head and food in your stomach!)
Misery knows no social class, and everything's a trade-off.
This is literally a first world problem. In the US, we have a culture that encourages self-actualization. This is a double-edged sword. While this encourages individuals to achieve their dreams, it also puts pressure on them to do great things.
I think the key is to do what you want, and not what society pressures you into doing.
So, I had a somewhat similar reaction and have made the same argument you are making in your last couple of sentences. It's frustrating to me when I see some of the dismissive sorts of comments as the article makes, because as you say it's often made by individuals who have it, and don't appreciate what happens when it's not there. I've even gone so far as to say it's insulting to the less well-off to dismiss it as a concern, because it does nothing to change things for the better.
Along these lines, in many systems or subcommunities, many of these status markers reflect something inherently broken about the system, often at a very deep or fundamental level. So do you just ignore this and climb up them? Sometimes, for whatever reason, you can change things, but other times it becomes impossible to do so, and you're left with the choice of playing the game and winning, or just exiting altogether and trying a different game somewhere else.
Sometimes that exiting comes across as sour grapes revisionism, but sometimes it's very real. It can be frustrating to know that your odds of achieving success are dependent on doing something immoral, corrupt, or, at best meaningless, or to know that it involves a huge amount of pure luck or systemic pathology that is never acknowledged. Sometimes you can just go with the flow, but if doing so starts to have notable costs in itself, it poses significant problems.
I have seen too many people who were born into wealthy families, "have it made", and yet totally self-destruct in ways that I am not sure I would wish on my worst enemy.
I think another perspective on this issue is worth making.
Why is there not more ambition in the developed world?
Maybe there is just as much ambition as there ever was. Maybe people have just shifted their goals. Maybe they have different drives. Instead of aspiring to be the next Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, maybe people have realised that this is not really what they want in life. Instead of having a strong desire for financial and business success, maybe people in the developed world have started to shift their focus to other things like friendship, family, enjoying life, and learning to be satisfied with less. Maybe in this new world we live in to be ambitious means something else. I don’t know.
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