Are we confusing contentment with a lack of ambition?
Sometimes a question or statement gets stuck in your head and you keep circling back to it. This is one I’ve been thinking about for over a month.
My husband and I recently crossed paths with a young woman who’d gotten a job through her aunt. She was still living in her home town and had no desire to move closer to the city or attend a far away college. She was living in a trailer with her boyfriend on her boyfriend’s family’s property.
And she was happy.
And calm.
The kind of happy and calm that you seldom see in a young twenty-something.
She never got bit by the Kerouac bug; never turned restless and mad with wanting.
I commented to my husband that it would be easy to mistake her contentment for a lack of ambition. And I’ve been thinking about that ever since.
Most of my life has been driven by the fear that if I am not pushing myself to do more, I will somehow instantly become Goldie Hawn in Death Becomes Hers… Alone, eating tubs of frosting, surrounded by feral cats, late on my rent, and delighting in the superficial death of my enemies. I’ve linked it here so you can understand the depths of this concern.
I have no true grounds for this fear. I’m a happily married woman, with organic vegetables growing in my garden, a reasonable number of cats, a home (mortgaged to be fair), and unless I’ve somehow forgotten a vendetta, no one I would count as an enemy.
And yet, I can never overcome the guilt that if I’m not throwing in everything I’ve got, I am failing to reach my potential. And I am somehow letting everyone — including myself — down.
But I have been restless most of my life, dreaming of Kerouac before I ever read him, mad to live, burning both ends of that swirling roman candle until it burned out… and then hunting down a new flame to somehow re-ignite the embers so I could keep on going. The truest phoenix, dead set on rising from the ashes.
This is a troublesome spiral because, in this scenario, what does contentment even look like? In this scenario, there is only ever ambition. Ambition for something more; for something better; for something else. I obfuscate contentment with stagnation. I mistake a plateau as an imminent canyon, or, worse, I see it as the tiny crest that reveals a larger peak just ahead.
And I know I’m not alone in this. This fear that pausing is the slippery slope that leads to a dead stop. That the dead stop is the end. That it is not contentment but failure that lies at the bottom of the canyon.
What must it be like to be twenty and content? And how do we release the burdens of ambition?
I’ll be thinking about this one for a while.
— Your faithful overachiever, Rebecca
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Okay, I have a lot of thoughts on this because I've been questioning myself a lot- just in terms of what achievement is and why I don't think I'll ever feel content, but I'm also not sure how much of that is looped into my depression/anxiety. All in all, I blame much of it on my asian american upbringing where success/status = how much money you've made = your overall worth, and I was constantly pitted against not even real people but an idealized version of who my mother wanted me to be, so all in all... my lack of ambition in those terms is more like a fear of failure, some weird acceptance that I will never be good enough, so this is fine, even if it's not (but it is?) Contentment for me at this moment is the joy I find in little things, the day to day stuff, but overall? Working on it.
Out of curiosity, how much is "a reasonable number of cats"? 😂
I think of some of my friends, many of them similar in age, who rarely travel - much of this is because they're based in the US with fewer vacation days - hardly ever read, don't show much curiosity about where I've travelled to and I used to wonder about them and think, how can they live like that? But they seem content - on the outside, at least - so maybe the joke is on me/us?
No regrets on my end, it can just be a hectic, uncertain life at times and I wonder if things might be 'easier' if I were more like them, happy with simple pleasures (or none at all).