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Ambition is generally regarded as a good thing.
The world loves go-getters. People who want to save the planet, populate other planets, and make Trillions of dollars while doing so. Whatever gets the boats floating.
Ambition is telling you that you can’t be happy and satisfied now.
Where does this belief come from?
It’s fabricated.
You’ve been programmed to believe that to be worthy and valuable you need to become someone in other people’s eyes. Ambition convinced you that to be truly satisfied you must be more than you are right now.
You’ve tied your self-worth to achievement. You’ve been made to believe that ambition and struggle are the only way to a good, fulfilling life.
This is perfect bullshit. It’s a never-ending treadmill running on bullshit.
And don’t be mistaken. The people who you want to be like are still on the same treadmill you are on.
Of course if you don’t have ambition you’re regarded as a second-class human. The more value you bring to society the more value you have as a human is the narrative.
We are programmed with so many false ideas about the fundamentals of being alive. We believe we need to get somewhere. We believe we are racing each other. We believe there are people who are further ahead.
But further ahead to where? Where do you think you’ll get to? Do you think you can buy your self-worth through achievement?
Let me tell you something. You could be fine right now if you would say everything is okay. You don’t need anything else.
Your Worth Is Baseless
Know that by chasing and achieving, all you’re going to get is a temporarily nicer experience. You might get a pat on your back and fancy yourself someone special because you have something.
Every day culture is feeding into the soul-neutering story that where you are right now is not good enough. If you don’t have the fancy car, the house, the partner, the career, etc., you’re a loser. There are people out there who are better than you.
And you believe that.
Guess what. It’s a lie. You’ve been lied to. Everything you’ve been conditioned to strive for as a means to fulfillment is a scam. Nothing you can achieve will provide you with true fulfillment — a sense of being done with the endless struggle for something else but this, here, now.
No one’s further ahead or better than anyone else. We’re all treading water.
You can skip all this fruitless flailing around trying to please the world. The shortcut which isn’t really a shortcut is acceptance.
Remove your self-worth from anything. Self-worth is perfectly baseless. It is unconditional. There is nothing you can be, do, or have to be worth more.
Your worth is incontestable. It’s not even worth talking about.
The Losing Game
Ambition is not bad. I’m not saying wanting a nicer experience or achieving goals is wrong. You can improve your experience and achieve goals without the added baggage of ambition.
Ambition says improvement and achievement will lead you to happy-ever-after. No, it doesn’t. In most cases, the sacrifice for ambition is the exact thing you hope to get by achieving whatever your ambition is telling you to achieve.
If you’re looking for some kind of confirmation of your abilities, or your specialness, or being better than others, then you’ve lost the plot. You’ve lost reality.
But every day culture is telling you that’s where it’s at. You need to compare and strive and struggle and prove yourself and make it.
That’s a losing game. You can’t win this game. No one ever won that game.
Again, the people who are where you think you want to be are still engaged in the same struggle. The struggle never ends. The struggle is not supposed to end.
The struggle is there to make you feel like you’re missing something, like you could be more, like you’re a lesser being. It wants you to be dependent. It wants you to keep chasing tokens of validation and those tokens are the little boost that keeps you struggling.
The struggle can only end when you stop playing the losing game.
Everyone who’s giving you the signal that you should be better is fucking with you. And they’re fucking with themselves.
Listen, you are complete, whole, worthy already. You are the totality. It’s not about becoming it; it’s about realizing you are it and then living your life from that place.
Ambition, Seeking, and Progress
It all starts with you accepting yourself as you are right now. And I’m not saying accept yourself as a means to an end.
Accept everything about you the way it is without the hope of it leading you to a better you. Nothing needs to be different.
What we are all consciously or unconsciously seeking is the end of seeking. You can’t seek your way to the end of seeking. Seeking can only end when you clearly see that what you’re seeking is the one who’s seeking.
Ambition, which is seeking gone haywire, largely stems from pain, lack, and insecurity. It might achieve great things, at least that’s how we label them, but most of those great things are distracting, destructive, and disappointing.
Anything you want to achieve to fill a deep hole of unworthiness will only enlarge the hole.
Look around. What have all our ambitions got us?
We have technological advancements and are completely disconnected from reality. Who gives a hoot about technology if you spend your life in a spiritually inhibited, deeply confusing, fearful, unhappy existence?
All technology does is amplify this existence.
Can you sincerely say that a Billion goddamn iPhones are making the world a better place?
Of course not! And it’s not the iPhone’s fault. The problem is that we put sophisticated technology into the hands of people who are still trying to figure out how to be human.
The technology might have grown up but we didn’t.
The End of Ambition
The developmentally stunted world requires you to feel lacking, incomplete, and insufficient. If you didn’t feel that way, you wouldn’t play along. And if no one would play along, then this fear-based system would wither away like that Monstera you forgot to water again.
You’ve tied your soul up in a chain and given it to this world so it can yank at it whenever it feels like it. You don’t need to bargain with the world to release the chain. There are no locks.
The first step is to disconnect. Disconnect from the message that tells you you’re insufficient, not enough, lacking, incomplete, unworthy, etc.
That message is disconnecting you from you. It is disconnecting you from reality.
But disconnecting from that message is not easy, at least not initially.
Everyone is preaching it like the gospel. Everyone is convinced that it’s true. Everyone is running on this message as if it’s the only fuel there is.
It’s not. That message is a lie.
If you keep running on that message, it will destroy you. It will suck all the joy and gratitude out of your life. But who am I telling that? It has already done enough damage in your life, hasn’t it?
It’s not too late.
Stop looking for something you’ve been led to believe is out there that will make you accept yourself, make you worthy, make you complete, make you whole. Stop buying into a narrative that requires you to be a certain way. Stop chasing a mirage.
In the end, we all want the same. We want a life that we can enjoy right now regardless of apparent imperfections, not a life that we’ll mayhaps enjoy in an imagined future when everything is exactly as you want.
Which of these lives is ambition feeding — your true actual life that is happening now or an imagined future life?
Reconnect with yourself and see that the sweetness of life you’ve been hoping to find is only present when you drop the yearning for something else. And then create something.
See what happens when ambition toward achievement is exchanged with joy for life. See what your life becomes when you dance for the sake of dancing not for the sake of moving towards another party. See what you add to the world when you’re no longer driven by fear, lack, and unworthiness.
Open your eyes and see.
Luka
Latest posts by Luka (see all)
- When Are You Done Working On Yourself? - September 4, 2024
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