Where Did My Ambition Go?

A drive to succeed has become a drive to just get by. Why workplace ambition is flickering out in this endless limbo.

Published in

GEN

7 min readJun 26, 2020

I’ve always had medium-sized dreams for my professional life. I wanted to be good at something and recognized for my expertise; I wanted to achieve, be productive, and make a living wage. I wanted to be a part of something. And in my 20 years of working life, I’ve been a part of each momentous heave in job culture — corporate worker bee, startup evangelist, freelancer, and now, the unmoored. I know all the shortfalls of writing about the way the world feels right now: History is cyclical; this too shall pass; it’s not all doom and gloom. But this current shift feels profound. It is profound. And now, in the present moment, in a time when the pandemic has caused so much uncertainty about the future of so many industries, professional ambition begins to feel like misplaced energy, as helpful to achieving success as chronic anxiety.

Since the coronavirus pandemic began in March, bringing life as we knew it to a standstill, more than 40 million Americans have filed for unemployment, and many industries have been decimated. I’m a writer and editor who can’t imagine a world where I get to have a full-time job anytime soon. Just getting by feels like an achievement. The pandemic derailed my ambitions, even my medium-sized ones. There are worse problems; there always are. An enormous and centuries-long overdue reckoning is taking place regarding the flawed institutional structures that have kept so many people down for so long. Watching so many writers and former colleagues I admire coming forward with grueling new stories of racial discrimination, it’s hard to feel optimistic for an industry that for so long was perfectly content with the status quo. Among the enormous changes that must be made, my dreams are, rightly, trivial. And yet they are still my dreams.