On the last season of Love is blind (the only reality show I watch, mind your business) during the pod dates a woman asked a man: “What is the number one thing you are looking for in a partner?”
The guy immediately fires back with “ambition.” It was so fast that it made me wonder if it was truly his opinion or a sad evidence of capitalism infiltrating our thinking. Either way.
I snorted. And honestly, it stopped me in my tracks.
Really? Cool if you find ambition attractive, but the number one thing? Out of all the things about a person that is what is the most important to you?
For real?
Like, really?
The most important?
I don’t know how many times I said ‘really?!’ to myself out loud.
The more I heal, the less ambitious I become.
I have no interest anymore in ambition. I even dislike the word.
On a podcast I recently listened to the question was posed: “Can ambition be virtuous?”
And I agree with the host guiding the conversation: it can’t. Ambition is inherently selfish.
Ambition requires you to have unhealthy priorities. I have seen it again and again. In myself and others. Ambition requires you to sacrifice the things that matter most in life - people, love, peace - to achieve something that matters in the eyes of capitalism, so that at the very end of that achievement you can circle back to: people, love and peace. Exhausted and burned out.
The more I heal, the less ambitious I become.
I have nothing to prove.
I grew up with conflicting themes as the first child, eldest daughter of immigrant parents, I was in between multiple worlds:
the parents that desperately tried to keep up the old world they left behind in the new environment they put us in - and a new world and culture I had to fit in if I wanted to survive.
My parents wanted me to be ambitious and do what they couldn’t do - at the same time I wasn’t allowed to do too much, achieve too much, fly too high.
I was always skating on the edge between soaring and flying close to the ground.
This theme has followed me all my life. I have been ambitious because I wanted to proof myself to my parents. I wanted to make them proud. I wanted to proof myself to my peers, to society, to the people I went to school with, to the people I went to church with, to the person working in the expensive boutique, to the strangers on the internet, to the business mentor.
I followed the capitalist rulebook for over a decade. It left me broken in pieces.
Ambition has never felt right to me, never felt good in my body. Always like a foreign, alien parasite. Something that doesn’t belong inside of me. For some time, due to the entrepreneur / spiritual guru messaging, I assumed maybe it was because I feel uncomfortable with being successful?
I know now, that that in itself is a weird notion: what kind of success are you talking about?