Ambition. Is it worth it?

Me oh marzipan, what a life. Much to my chagrin, I’ve actually been doing things lately. It’s all stuff I mostly enjoy doing, but I’m really only doing all this stuff now so I can do nothing later. Which… isn’t that what we’re all doing? We work our asses off now in the prime of our lives so we can do nothing when we retire, and then we retire and realize we have no idea how to do nothing because we’ve been doing something for the last 50 years.

The problem for me is I’ve learned how to do nothing early on, so now I often get stuck wondering what the point of doing anything is. I mean, there really is no ultimate point to doing anything. I suppose the point of doing anything is in the doing itself. The point of doing something is to do it. But there’s nothing beyond that. Literally. The only thing beyond the doing is non-doing, which is nothing. There is nothing beyond something.

Anyways, this is the conundrum of being. In order to be something, we have to have been nothing. Something only exists in contrast to nothing, and doing something only exists in contrast to not doing anything at all. Not doing anything at all sounds like it would be easy, but it’s actually way harder than doing something. How many of us can just sit there and not do anything at all? Just let life go by without any television, music, or stimulation. It ain’t easy, especially in today’s age.

Once we realize how simply wonderful doing nothing is, however, it begins to change our perspective on things. We start to notice the folly in overdoing things, and we’re always overdoing things. The United States is just one big overdone cluster of doing. We’re doing things so hard here it’s crazy. This country is the definition of no chill.

It makes it all the more difficult to do nothing when everyone around you is always doing something. Because we exist in unison with our environment and not somewhere outside of it, this constant doing happening around us will eventually overwhelm us whether we like it or not. That’s why it helps to sometimes make our own space to not do anything at all. The more complicated and busy our lives become, the more difficult it is to find or create this space. But just a couple minutes a day can make all the difference.

Considering I spent the better part of the last year and a half not doing anything at all, the transition back into doing things has been interesting. Again, I don’t really want to do anything. Well, that’s not true. I don’t want to never do anything, that’s too much. I have realized, though, that all I really want to do is walk around with a notebook and occasionally write some stuff. Hang out with the people I love… and umm… yeah, that’s pretty much it.

I used to be incredibly ambitious. Those feelings pop up on occasion, but for the most part I could care less. What exactly is ambition? Is it simply an expression of desire? The desire to become something other than what you are, or to achieve something in the future? I suppose that’s kind of the crux of it. Knowing that desire is the root of suffering kind of squashes any ambition, especially if you’ve reached a place of contentment.

We do this thing in our culture where we glorify the whole “chip on the shoulder” attitude.  Because we consider achievement to be the highest honor, we rationalize the mentality it takes to achieve something. We believe if we take on the frame of me against the world, and we really stick it to the world, this must be a good thing. But this is exhausting. Being around someone like this is draining, and it becomes incredibly isolating. Me vs. the world is a lonely place to pin yourself. Not to mention a disadvantageous one.

We also seem to glorify individual achievement over shared experience. Everyone congratulates you when you do something all by yourself, but nobody comes to your graces when you simply share an experience with a group of people. “I enjoyed dinner with my friends last night” is not met with the same type of congratulatory attitude as building your own company from scratch that slowly scorches the earth and manipulates consumer psychology to generate more of a symbolic currency.

Once one realizes how our ambition only leads to eventual death, destruction, and suffering, why would we be ambitious? Ambitious towards what, exactly? Ambition is always directed towards something other than what is actually happening, causing us to lose sight of what is happening. Through the tint of our ambitious glasses, we cannot see clearly. 

We wind up taking on an ethos of “the end justifies the means,” and we’ll do anything to justify our ambition. We convince ourselves to carry on with the most horrific means, because at least they will get us to the place we’ve imagined in our heads, where everything is rosy and glorious. Alas, that place only exists in our heads, and we arrive here once more. There is no end, only now. The grass is not greener on the other side because there is no other side. We have green grass right here. Roll in it.

- The Guy