Be Unambitious

In a culture orientated around status and busyness, ‘ambition’ is the golden virtue.

Social media and self-help testimonials promotes a state of permanent striving. Better bodies, entrepreneurial side-hustles. Crushing it.

To be ambitious is to be moving, dynamic, long-term.

To be unambitious is to be stagnant, slovenly, stuck, short-term.

The trade magazine of Northern Ireland’s Chamber of Commerce, sometimes scattered in coffee shops, is titled, simply: Ambition.

But what might the benefits be of opting out of ambition? At least in the terms it’s sold to us?

Ambition was not always such such a revered trait. Some cultures regarded it as a vice.

I’ve been reading Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a product of a Renaissance Christian culture which placed ambition amongst man’s rich catalogue of sinful longings.

Here, to be ambitious is to lack gratitude for what the Almighty has already provided for you.

It is a failing linked with pride, an excessive self-regard which looks at the world and deems it not enough.

No-one was more ambitious than Satan, the rebel Angel, who saw the whole bounty of Creation and decided he could do better.

This policing of ambition was partly political, a way to discourage the suffering lower classes from seeking to better their lot. To be ambitious was to be a dissident, agitating for a profane change to the current order of things.

But it was also part of a genuine, if religiously inspired, project of trying to understand what man is and why he suffers so much.

In line with the Achilles heel model of tragedy, which organises the downfall of tragic heroes alongside a central internal fault, ambition is the motor of Macbeth’s disintegration.

Which is a little weird, because it’s an important drive, sure, but the play only mentions the word ‘ambition’ three times.

Macbeth’s ambition is not the kind that sets definite goals: ‘I want to be king and here’s how I will achieve it’. No vision boards here.

In fact, he seems to not really want it at all. The whole process makes him miserable.

Macbeth’s desire seems a thing that doesn’t belong to him. It comes from somewhere else, a restless, unnamed, unformed energy that propels him into a series of joy-killing actions: murder, lies, tyranny.

The phrase first appears when the witches put the idea of the throne inside Macbeth, at the time a loyal subject to his highness, and he writes to his wife to alert her to the prophecy.

Lady Macbeth wonders aloud if her husband has the mettle to follow through with the grim deeds that ambition demands: ‘thou wouldst be great; / Art not without ambition, but without / The illness should attend it.’

Here, it seems, the issue is the ‘illness’, not ambition itself. But what does ambition without the illness actually look like? Is it even action-able?

In the hyper-masculine warrior society of 11th century Scotland, violence and domination are the only mechanisms to channel and satisfy ambition. If you wanna be king you gotta kill the king.

Like water running through cracks in the stone, ambition finds its form in the shapes already present.

We get our instructions from the world, and those instructions can put us at odds with our better natures.

Ambition produces alienation. Macbeth’s speech becomes littered with images of self-division. ‘What hands are here?’ he wonders, staring at his bloody palms.

The subject becomes split, because the subject is compelled, via an internal force they don’t understand, do to things they’d really rather not be doing.

We don’t kill kings, but we still chase crowns.

The modern career is framed as a series of difficult but necessary progressions: if you just do this unpleasant thing, and then the next unpleasant thing, eventually you’ll get the Really Good Thing and it will all be worth it.

Not all careers are like that, obviously, but the escalator model is embedded deep in our understanding of what personal progress looks like.

I had a full-time office job with a desk and phone and decent salary. My manager handed in his notice and I was offered his job.

I said no.

Then I quit and took a part-time job in a chill cafe so I would have more free time to focus on creative and emotional self-development.

I am 100% aware how spectacularly wanky that sounds. Try explaining it to your Uncle at a party.

And, yeah, on top of the daily writing, and therapy, and self-care there’s a fair bit of fucking around.

But isn’t this kind of refusal ambitious, in its own small way? Isn’t the distinction just one of framing?

I’m not Macbeth. I know that. But I’m not not Macbeth too.

Ambition and growth aren’t always the same thing.

Common sense concepts come with built-in assumptions.

Words are spacious things and they hold hidden rooms.

Maybe the solution isn’t to be ‘more’ or ‘less’ ambitious, but to simply exercise agency. Reclaim the idea for ourselves, and rewrite it. Might it be possible to be more ambitious in our creativity, in our critical thinking, in how we open our hearts to the world?

What would it look like to be more ambitiously kind?