Your Ambition Is Turning You into a Loser

When you saw this title, you may have thought it’s clickbait, a cheap attempt at sensational paradox. But the claim used to be more or less conventional wisdom, and it’s high time that it returns to that status.

Turn somewhere for advice today – books, movies, television, social media, the education system, your place of worship – and you are bombarded with exhortations to never give up, never quit; if you believe it, you can achieve it; be the first person to arrive and the last person to leave, etc. The slogans of ambition are endless. The internet is crawling with them. They are widely sourced, from religious texts to quotes from business gurus and sports celebrities to the proverbs of African hunters.

Indeed, self-made success has become sacred and central to modern culture. This didn’t happen overnight, either. One can dig into the history of it and talk about the American Dream or before that Napoleon, the self-made emperor. But here I’ll stick to the everyday present, in which unbridled and open ambition has become a major cultural toxin.

The pursuit of success for the sake of success has spread through all segments of society. Bright young things in universities and then boardrooms plan on climbing the ladder or, even better, “disrupting” it. Social media accounts of hustlers and success gurus garner millions of followers.  Disembodied success has become a pursuit of its own, the specific form it is to take being secondary, to be decided as the opportunity arises. Popular music, and especially hip-hop, its leading form, celebrates this attitude in its own brash way. Even the emotional types have fallen prey; for their part, they read soapy self-help literature on how to become your best self and get out there and “kick some ass.” Seduction too has become a statistical contest, often measured in the number of likes or followers.

Yet, rather than producing a generation of “winners,” all this frenzied obsession with getting ahead has done nothing but generate unprecedented levels of ineptitude and mental illness.

Why and how is your ambition turning you into a loser? Simply put, by putting so much value in your future success you are devaluing your present self; you are giving too much respect to those who already have what you seek and turning yourself into a pathetic worshipper at their feet, someone who they can control and exploit. Your ever-inflating ambition is creating an ever-increasing psychological gulf between you and your “role models,” thus creating an ever more pathological dynamic of sadomasochism in which the winners you envy are turning into gods and you are turning into a worm. This is not conducive to success. It is not healthy.

All this is a reiteration of the argument that I made in the essay “Idol Worship,” available in my book Catharses: Essays in Applied Mimetic Theory (please buy and review). There, I take a more scholarly approach, delving into psychology, philosophy, and religion. Here, again, I’ll stick to the everyday.

The first thing to get out of the way is the crass delusion that ambition is the pursuit of your authentic self, a quest for uncovering your true passion, which would make the unique you come out and shine. No. For one, you’ve been brainwashed into this odd quest of discovering your true self by all forms of media, from movies to books to blogs to self-help manuals. So, the idea of becoming authentic is itself not authentic. Second, you cannot possibly pick a pursuit that’s unique. You want to write a blog or a book (or a newsletter)? You want to make artisanal soap? You want to travel to Nepal? You want to pick up sailing? All been done, and done very well. The obscure pursuit you pick in hope of finding a niche only makes you look more pathetic when it inevitably turns out that it already has an eager, geeky fanbase. At least the popular pursuits have the authority of a large consensus to back them up.

There is nothing less authentic than a person who is fixated on achieving authenticity. There is no better slave on the consumerist plantation (“Here’s a new model of shoes with a slightly different shape, only authentic people wear it! $300, please.”)

In everything you do, you are imitating someone else who’s done essentially the same thing and done it better than you. And you better be imitating someone much better than you. Should you imitate someone worse than you? How can you improve then?

It's important to get the delusion of authenticity out of the way to understand why your ambition is making you a loser. If you don’t, you won’t understand the numbers game. As you roam and dash towards your vaunted goal, you think you are escaping the crowd, or more precisely, rising above it, but the reality is that everyone in that crowd is also roaming and dashing. Your ambition will not get you through the narrow door. It will get you stuck in the wide door, the widest door of them all.

The word “ambition” in Latin means to go around (canvassing for votes). But you don’t need an etymological dictionary, you only need to stop and think about it, to understand that ambition is always about others – gaining their admiration. It’s never about yourself, authentic or copied. It’s about gaining prestige, which in Latin means “delusion, illusion.” Those Latins packed a lot of wisdom in their language, right? It’s almost as though for them the arguments I’m presenting here were conventional wisdom baked into everyday language. And it’s as though we use Latin terms to obscure the original meaning of our words…

So, ambition is not about finding your unique self, but rather a mass-participation game in which every participant is trying to sway the mass of others. How exactly does this make you a loser? Let’s think logically. First, you must agree with me that you can’t be ambitious about something you already have. If you already have a billion dollars, it is not possible for you to be ambitious about making a billion dollars. So, winners cannot be ambitious, at least not about that which they have already won, and which makes them winners.

On the other hand, if you don’t have a billion dollars, and you are ambitious about it, you are not helping yourself; rather, you are helping the guy who already has a billion dollars.

Let’s first see why you are helping the other guy. The ambition of the masses to earn a billion dollars is what gives the current billionaires prestige, and their prestige is made of nothing other than this mass ambition of others. In a country where no one wants to be a billionaire, being a billionaire has no value. At least no ontological value, though sure, you could still exchange your cash for a big lot of trinkets no one cares about.

The desires of the many generate the advantage of the few. Your ambition is a source of energy that plugs into a mass current of imitated ambitions of thousands of others. This enormous emotional energy is harvested by those who already possess the objects of mass ambition: it makes them admirable, gives them prestige, and gives them control. This energy works to build the entire value system of the power structures: it defines the winners but also defines the losers; it defines good and bad, attractive and repulsive. It creates vertical distances between individuals, and you, the ambitious one, are always below.

Consider the common ambition of becoming a tech founder. This ambition works great for those who already are founders. It makes them widely admired, worshipped almost, it inflates their companies’ stock prices orders of magnitude above their objective valuations, it sells their products, it gives them tremendous social influence. You dream of becoming a movie star? That works great for Leo DiCaprio – he gets treated like a god.

In liberal Western society, the dominant currency of prestige is, well, currency – money. The system has a fabulous facility for converting prestige into profit. The prestige won by the late Steve Jobs translated into premium margins for Apple products. The prestige of Elon Musk translates into high Tesla stock valuations. The prestige of Leo DiCaprio translates into box office windfalls.

But is Leo DiCaprio ambitious? Is Elon Musk? Not really. DiCaprio is a movie star. He doesn’t dream about it, he experiences his stardom as a natural and inalienable part of his person and identity. He may care about getting another Oscar or outperforming a rival actor, but that’s not ambition. That’s competition, rivalry. Ambition is after reaching a higher level of being, and as far as Leo is concerned, he’s already at that level. He believes it, he acts like it, and everyone else believes him.

Okay, so your ambition boosts those who are already on top. “Makes sense,” you say. “But why doesn’t it help me? Ambition is motivation, it pushes me to excel.” Well, not really. Ambition is desire separate from any particular object of desire. One is ambitious, and then one chooses a particular goal for that ambition. One may then pursue that goal the right way or the wrong way. And ambition, like all desire, festers; the more it dwells and contemplates its goal the more it embellishes it, the more fascinated it becomes by the goal, and the more it endows the goal with prestige. It seeks and finds others with the same goal, and the crowd of ambitious admirers share their visions of prestige and reinforce it to each other. (Later, they will become rivals and enter into conflict with each other over that shared goal.)

The work of ambition is the work of building a pearl around a grain of sand or a mountain out of a molehill. Those who possess the pearl or the grain of sand, or the molehill or the mountain, are loving it. Your ambition makes them into popular idols. But what is happening to you? The more your goals become fabulous in your imagination, the more your own life becomes mundane and insignificant.

You are marching straight toward mental illness. You are developing an inferiority complex, or narcissism; maybe you’re becoming a snob, perhaps even becoming a conspiracy theorist. You’re surely becoming less convincing as a contender. You’re just a fan, a stan, you’d be happy to get an autograph or buy the autobiography. Your feverish imagination, in collaboration with your friends who share the same “interests” (unhealthy obsessions), is creating gods out of the haves and monsters out of your rivals. The successful are fabulous, divine; those who keep you separated from that same divine grace are devils. You are participating in nothing less than a creation of mythology. You are likely to engage in the practice of rituals, enforcement of taboos, and violent scapegoating and sacrifice. Sooner or later, your ambition leads to violence.

(The cultural Marxists are right about the bedeviling existence of power structures. Where they are wrong is in their belief that redistribution will erase those power structures. Redistribution is impossible as long as ambition exists; the only way to disempower the power structures is to overcome ambition.)

So if not through ambition, how does one achieve anything? Surely, we are not supposed to cruise through life loafing around on the couch, watching TV and eating unhealthy food? Right, I’m not advising giving up on the world, and there is a way to both succeed and be unique, but that way is not through ambition. Not at all.

One, lesser way is to simply hide one’s ambition. In this case, you are ambitious, but it’s a handicap, a liability that you need to overcome. There are certainly many people who succeed and who are ambitious, but to make it, they must hide their ambition like the devil hides his tail. Instead of displaying their ambition, which implies a lack of fulfillment, they display a sense of fulfillment, which implies a lack of ambition. This approach goes by many names. “Fake it till you make it.” “Believe it and you can achieve it.” “The power of positive thinking.” Etc. The idea here is that you act as though you already are successful. You project the aura of transcendence. You show no desire to make it; you act like you’ve already made it. You’re not trying to be Elon Musk, like all them other losers, you already are like Elon Musk.

Jesus says, “Ask, and you shall receive.” But Jesus is not interested in ambition or earthy success, for which, as the great Rene Girard puts it, holds the opposite rule: “Do not ask, and you shall receive.” In other words, never act desperate. Now, the earthly idols are not very generous, so there’s no guarantee that you will receive if you don’t ask. Indeed, if you don’t receive, you will be labeled a narcissist: a person who thinks they are better than who they really are.

It seems to me that back in high school and middle school, most of us were much more aware of this rule of life. We all wanted to be popular, but we never showed it. We acted cool. We had crushes, but we hid them. This fundamental rule of conduct, of hiding our ambition, is still very much in force in all traditional societies. People in non-Western countries don’t sit around with their friends bragging about their dreams of success. It’s considered indecent. It’s only very recently that Western society itself removed that taboo.

“High school never ends,” as the song goes, and the same basic rules apply for the rest of one’s life. You don’t get anywhere in your career or any other pursuit by advertising your ambition. By doing that, you are not staking any claims, you are not burning any ships. Rather, you are indicating that you are not in possession of any field or any island worth having. When the Vikings burned their ships upon arriving in Ireland, they weren’t ambitious about staying in Ireland; they already were in Ireland, and they were just letting the locals know that they’re not leaving. By flexing, by competing, you are only inviting other have-nots to butt heads with you, to the detriment of you both. You are revealing your cards. You are a gladiator for success, and the emperor is sitting up high in his seat, eating figs and drinking wine, and enjoying you and your rival slaughtering each other for his glory. The emperor, of course, never fought any duels.

The modern capitalist principle that competition is good has been taken too far. It was originally a judgment against monopolies and unfair privileges, and to that extent, it is good. The idea was to decentralize power, and what it was really after was not competition but differentiation ­– the creation of choice, of options. Competition, meanwhile, produces clones that imitate and destroy each other and that, paradoxically, leave the non-competitor with all the loot. “Competition is for losers,” says Peter Thiel, the next-generation Silicon Valley capitalist and a student of mimetic theory.

The higher road to achievement is the road of selflessness. You forget about yourself and your ambition. You forget about prestige. You do something because it fulfills you in the moment, and not because it might get you something in the future. This is when work stops feeling like work. For example, I had moments like this when I started boxing. I was already in my thirties, there was no way for me to plan to win a championship belt. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed sparring; whether I won or lost didn’t matter so much. I didn’t box because I wanted to win a fight or even to impress women, I just loved being in the ring. The purity of that first encounter has faded a bit, I must admit, but that’s the feeling you get when you truly discover your calling. It doesn’t have to feel exactly ecstatic; sometimes this feeling of selflessness is a feeling of charity. Sometimes we do it for others. For example, parenthood feels like that.

When we do something out of selfless love, we no longer care about authenticity. We care about communion. When we contemplate those who do it better than us, we feel admiration and respect rather than envy and rivalry. We hide nothing: neither our intentions nor our shortcomings, nor our true feelings about the others pursuing the same thing.

The selfless people turn out to be the ones who discover their authentic selves. They find that white rock with their new name written secretly on it. And the ones who hide their ambition, who keep it cool, are really trying to appear as the people who are doing it out of true love. (People who don’t hide their ambition don’t get to do anything, ever.) Both types appear like they don’t worry about what others think about their activities. Both appear absorbed and self-sufficient. Both appear as seasoned masters of their craft. Both appear convinced in the moral rectitude of their pursuit. But one of them only appears thus; the other truly is. The first one goes through exhausting mental efforts to keep the façade, the other only grows more vigorous.

But I don’t want to come off as too judgmental of the fakers. If we’re being honest, we all fake it to a degree; we are all at least somewhat hypocritical. The fakers at least have the decency to put in a good appearance, to pay that much respect to good form. Meanwhile, the openly ambitious, with their self-help books and Tony Robbins seminar tickets, their yoga and meditation, their hypochondriac dieting and whatnot, cannot be more pathetic. There is no stronger signal that you do not possess “the secret” than you reading The Secret. There is no greater signal that you do not possess influence than you reading How to Win Friends and Influence People. Your lack of transcendence stinks to high heaven, and it would perhaps be more decent if you bandaged it up with some hypocrisy.

The ambitious villains of more civilized eras, like those in Godfather movies perhaps, wore tuxedos with white roses tucked in the lapel and listened to opera, and they stabbed their enemies in dark alleys. Today’s villains make music and YouTube videos flaunting their ambition and their rented symbols of success. A sense of shame has left the house. Ambition is confessed from the rooftops, and as a direct consequence, the rivalry has become more acute. The process of hubris and nemesis has sped up. Today’s gangbangers die faster, today’s businessmen are broke, and today’s yuppies are suicidal. And they are all on drugs.

Even the ladies, the last group you’d think would lose their grip on the game of keeping one’s cool, are going wild all over Instagram and Tinder, displaying ever more parts of their ever more modified bodies. At least it still hasn’t gotten to the point where they openly chase men, but still, their screaming claims of being the queens of the whole universe are starting to fall apart, and they too are looking pathetic, at least to anyone with half a brain left.

The intoxication with ambition and rivalry has reached such a pitch that people are regressing to the social dynamics of the animal kingdom and describing themselves as “alpha males.” They are starting to identify with apes and dumber beasts whose groups are organized into “dominance hierarchies,” like those wolf packs or like the pecking orders among domestic chickens. We were supposed to have evolved out of that several hundred thousand years ago, but here we are, staring at the thing again.

We are certainly very far from traditional societies, which, despite their other failings, knew that restraint of desire was the key to civilization and that if unrestrained, desire leads to obsession, oppression, rivalry, and every kind of social plague.

The masters or winners that we end up loving were never ambitious. The ones we resent are the ones who were, but who faked it. The lovable ones were selflessly absorbed in their work. Messi loved football from the beginning; it wasn’t about winning prestige. Had ambition been his driving force, it would have exhausted him early on and turned him into a loser. Messi didn’t want to be famous and then decided to pursue football after a careful calculation of his talents. Messi loved football first, and he would have loved it even if he didn’t become famous. Look into the biography of any admirable achiever and you will find the same selfless love for their pursuit.

To come back to the loose thread above: why is it that nowadays people are so stupid as to flaunt their ambition? This is a very fascinating question that deserves at least one whole book. It’s a classic and not quite answered question of Rene Girard’s mimetic theory. For the end here, I will say that it seems to arise out of our culture’s odd fusion of confessional vulnerability and the romantic belief in the innocence of our desires. The openly ambitious individual is on one hand proclaiming a coveted status of a gritty underdog, baring his heart, and admitting weakness. On the other, he is professing a belief in the utopian promise of progressivism, that of one day making everyone happy (i.e., successful). The system not only tolerates his passions but is built on them: it perpetuates itself by producing consumerist carrots on a stick for these passions to pursue.

In previous eras, when no one believed in the innocence of desire, or in the possibility of everyone being successful, flaunting one’s ambition was seen as an attack on the precious and precarious social order. Revealing your ambition to people in those days was like telling people today that you are a terrorist or something. Wasn’t cool, at all. In today’s low-T West, it just makes you look like a total loser.