When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors.
He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference.
The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them.
Desires are already memories.
That’s Calvino’s Invisible Cities—I’m always finding myself referencing the same three things: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, and Mythologies by David Lehman. (As one of my friends calls it, these are my foundational texts.)
I think we should be more worried about working our entire lives for a dream we can never enjoy. “There’s no sense of accomplishment — rather a feeling of discontent. “Eventually, the city of desire reduces to a city of memory, rather nostalgia.”1
It’s no mistake this passage is in Cities & Memory: becoming a “city of memory” is so notable — you never get that ideal of perfection, and your dreams might only materialize partially or differently from how you imagined. So, given that, should we forget about the impossible dream we tend to go for your entire life? Is striving all you should do, or when does stopping make sense?
For the past half-year, I’ve been thinking about ambition and its role in my everyday value judgments. Honestly, I’d like to focus more on the emotional experience of ambition beyond the portrayal of the “grindset” in movies or those motivational YouTube videos.
an illustration of Calvino’s Invisible Cities by Lima-based Karina Puente
(NOTE: find the substack version of this to leave comments here! <3)
1.
As I spend more time in college, I hear more and more people talk about finding the thing that will be their life’s calling. It is easy to wait for some Thing™ out there to grab you by the neck and define your life, but most of the time, that thing doesn’t ever appear. Or, at least, the ones that don’t involve accidentally finding yourself climbing various ladders (be it corporate, social, or prestige).
Just as I don’t think I believe in the concept of a soulmate, I don’t think there’s that ultimate problem out there for me — instead, you’ve got to allow yourself to “commit to the bit” and work on the thing you think you like.
For the longest time, I thought my passion for engineering and/or neuroscience was purely because of momentum (i.e., I did a lot of it in high school and felt like this was what I was best at). Therefore, it was invalid for me to say this is what I loved, but, actually, what of it?
After asking this of many people who seem to have found their Thing™ in the UK this past August, I’ve started to become much more charitable to myself. Maybe this is slightly existentialist, but it’s almost a game, isn’t it? There is no overall destination or reason for existence—we must each find that for ourselves. “You are the things you do,” and we are unfortunately stuck with this freedom to choose. So there isn’t some correct or wrong answer; we’ve just got to commit.
The Age Of Reason by Sartre
I’ve always wanted to be the kid that waits for the second marshmallow (that’s what we’re told is the best measure of success) but honestly, I think we should actually be the one that eats the first one. (The study was disproved anyways.)2 I always eat my favorite ice cream last, save the lucky charms marshmallows for later, etc., but somehow child me didn’t learn that the last ice cream melts; that the marshmallows, when left out too long, kind of suck.
Sometimes, ambition is the intrinsic desire to mean something, an existential need to learn and improve.
Let’s take a step back here: is ambition intrinsic?
There’s an old Greek concept of kleos: to want individual glory. Is this inherent within us? Or did we have to be taught ambition? If every individual is independently ambitious, is this good for the community as a whole (i.e., evolutionary advantage), similar to when optimal games are played when everyone is a rational player? But, if so, where does this come from, and how (why) do cultures differ? How do less individualistic Eastern cultures deal with this, where there is much more of an emphasis on the group vs. the self?
Consider Hamilton (or, at least, the fictional version of him in the musical): he does everything because he dreams of having a legacy.3 While not everyone (including me) is as obsessed with legacy as this Lin-Manuel version of Hamilton was, I feel like ever since I was young, I wanted to “make a dent in the world.” I wanted to change something. To matter; to know and be known.
Am I a fool to picture my own funeral as a real gala affair?
Everybody’s there, everybody cares about me
Am I a wretch to fantasize about my death
Like it was some big event everybody laments?
Where everybody says, “What a life he led”
[…]
Or am I just a lot like all the rest? (All the rest, all the rest)
A little egotistical, a little self-obsessed
If a tree fall on me, will it crash or just fall silently?
Will there be anybody to see the death of me? The end of me?
— End of Me, Mother Mother
2.
Or, consider fuzzy values as a way to combat value capture (when a person’s rich and subtle values are simplified and quantified, and those simplified versions dominate their practical reasoning, akin to goodharts).4 How do we deal with ambitions while ensuring we do not become the worst versions of ourselves? A constant issue is avoiding over-optimizing for things — “Goodharts all the way down.”
I yearn for something I don’t quite know: I don’t dream of some specific job, to reach the top of some ladder… It’s not that I wouldn’t do these things, but in my imagination of the future, I can only see a hazy version of myself.
it’s kind of hard for me to imagine myself older right now because i feel like all of my spare mental cycles are always being burned in the fire of getting things done today - a.s.
There’s a constant urge for us to want to feel significant externally, and this translates into internal ambition. In an school newspaper essay a friend from high school wrote, she talks about how, maybe, this solipsism is not the problem we think it is:
Be the most solipsistic version of yourself. In other words, be someone who believes that their own existence is the only thing that is real.
I am calling on every one of you to be the main character. If we must spend so many moments of adolescence contemplating self-image and adulthood, so be it, but be defyingly that way: be that proud solipsist. If we pettily and secretly think we are the centers of the universe anyway, then we should try to believe that we are indeed capable of achieving everything in the universe.
Is it too “fuzzy” to be ambitious towards a feeling?
If one dreams of happiness or fulfillment, what is that, exactly? What if it externalizes to be a life that doesn’t “seem” ambitious: having a partner and kids; working at a 9-5; being able to play music with a band of friends at night; living near your extended family… In what’s stopping you?, gavin says “Getting to L6 at Google; having 2 children; saying true things; retiring at 50; being kind. This is a lot. It is more than most humans who ever lived achieved.”
Do not let others tell you whether or not the work you do is important — do not let the AI safety people tell you your research is useless; do not let the scientists tell you that your art is meaningless.
When did persuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy? (…) But these were the days of self-fulfillment, where settling for something that was not quite your first choice of a life seemed weak-willed and ignoble. Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice. There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault.
— a little life, hanya yanagihara
Yet, there is a line. The right kind of ambition cannot trespass upon others. In a universe (or community) of ambitious people, it should not lead to hurt feelings or a toxic environment. Don’t only talk to/respect those that are “useful” to you and ignore the rest, which is something I see all too often :(.
3.
Maybe ambition comes from a desire to be known.
I feel like I’m so scared of not being known. I think this is perhaps why I post and tweet and write so much. I want to tell the same stories to everyone so they know me. I’m retelling and retelling; I am always finding myself asking, “Oh wait, did I tell you this before?” because I repeat the same things. I want to reduce my life into soundbites so it’s easier for those around me to digest, remember, and regurgitate.5
Maybe by being someone worthy of spending time on, we believe people will want to know us, and we’ll get a chance to know them, too. Perhaps it is an avoidance of knowing ourselves—when we always look to the future, we do not need to worry about how we are now.
I worry deeply that I’ll forever be inadequate, but if I am always thinking about how I’m striving for a future where I am not, then I can still feel in control. I can still keep trying.6
You said, remember that life is
Not meant to be wasted
We can always be chasing the sun!
So fill up your lungs and just run
But always be chasing the sun!
— chasing the sun, sara bareilles
4.
Ambition is perhaps also a sort of tolerance, an almost seeking, of pain in the hopes of something more. It is a romanticization of putting in pain and tears and putting in the work for some idea of something happening in the future. Yet, this brings us back to that initial Invisible Cities quote: when do you stop putting your long-term over short-term? Shouldn’t there be a sort of balance?
In a letter my friend F. Luo wrote me a while ago, she wrote about how striving is a familiar constant. Because, “If you stop trying, what else is there? Trying is all we have, and it is all we can use to frame our dreams.”
Gena Soh’s I’ve been away, I’ve been sad, I’ve been making decisions, I’m going to get better (link) puts a lot of my thoughts beautifully:
I realise I’m scared of being beholden to someone. I’m scared of making decisions I will regret. I’m scared of going through the experience. I’m scared that every experience I choose, with varying levels of uncertainty, will demand that I tolerate an indeterminate period of suffering without escape. I’m scared of discovering that I’m inadequate. I’m scared of giving up my freedom — this is a big one — I’m scared of being exposed. I’m scared of having to become humble. I’m scared of discovering my true size in a domain which has never been mine. I’m scared of work, I’m scared of years of sacrifice — before I put in the sacrifice — to amount to nothing.
[…] I don’t think many people feel this changing of masks as dramatically as I do. Most feel this ‘professional self’ as a mechanical or even, an entertaining and exciting endeavour. I feel real grief about it. I still yearn to live in the world fully as me, without changing any part of me, without sacrificing any aspect of my want.
In Chinese, there’s this concept of ‘吃苦’ (chi ku), a phrase that means to persevere through hardship/suffering without complaint.
Growing up, the adults around me told me all the time that I have to learn to 吃苦… that opportunities only come to those who are prepared.
In a series of conversations with A.Z. over the past few months, I’ve also thought about the way one makes decisions.
A good framework is the minimization of retroactive regret, perhaps. When I think about the risks I can choose to take—will I regret the potential negative outcome or not taking them more? Regret is one of the hardest emotions to sit with (it is an ugly feeling, as coined by Sianne Ngai) because there truly is nothing you can do. Perhaps I am scared I will regret the decisions I make in am making my ~20s when I am much older. Perhaps this is what inspires me to keep trying.
This podcast I was recently sent by J.M. says something that resonated deeply:
We will all be dead any minute. The key consequence of this finitude is that it makes our choices matter. When it comes to how we use our time, because we don’t have an endless amount of it, something is always at stake. Any decision to spend an amount of time on one thing, that is a decision to not spend on other things instead.
5.
The game I played the most with my sister when we were young was a game we nicknamed “wilderness." (Genuinely, I have no clue how we managed to log some crazy hours into this game and how we made up any of the stories.) In this game, we would hide in our backyard (or, a few times, the LA Huntington Gardens!), pretending to be self-sufficient while scavenging for things and attempting to build a variety of structures.
I was much more obsessed with that idea of self-sufficiency than I probably should have been. I grew up a very lonely child with my face always buried in books—and there’s something about growing up enamored by the hero’s journey, about the main character that always happens to have the skills needed to take them to the next stage.
I’ve always wanted to be everything.
Hence my chronic overcommitment—I can’t say “NO”! I want to be involved in it all, to learn and be skilled at it all, to be the best but also be interdisciplinary while also having time for everyone in my life. (Coming to MIT, actually, has been one of the most helpful things for this, actually, because I’ve realized I can never be the “best” in the most raw form of the word, and so instead I work on being the “best” in a way I actually like, and not some quantitative metric of competition math ability or coding speed.)
Isn’t it kind of scary we must rely on others? I wanted to learn how to defend myself, how to make the things I needed, and to have my own contingencies. It’s grown into a desire to know things (I’ve given up on being a black belt in martial arts). But I’ve also grown into an appreciation that I must fall back on my friends just as much as they can rely on me.
Secretly, in my heart, I’ve always harboured the seed of ambition. Every profligate dreamer hungers secretly for the world to be remade in their vision. There is a ruthlessness to this desire, the willingness to force yourself upon the world to remake it, the insolence about your vision to believe it worthwhile, and even the selfishness to remain indifferent to the fact that others may not want your vision. To actualise a dream in reality is to apply force to the world and to make it different. To be an effective dreamer is to channel your aggression effectively. This “effectiveness” is dependent on how good you are at execution, the means you’ve got, how creative and resourceful you are, how relentless you are. These are immortal laws and everything that we see today is a product of actualising this will.
6.
Initially, I created this playlist as a way to make myself focus, to lock in, to tell myself that that I can do so much more if I just tried harder and harder, but honestly I found myself adding more songs that made me question this. But where does this “grindset” end—when does trying harder plateau?
(Sidenote: this post is titled as it is and was inspired because of a notion page I keep rants about the playlists I make, since they truly are bookmarks of my life <3).
hope — Truly one of the most inspirational songs out there (maybe controversial take?). I love the way NF is brutally honest—you’re the only person in charge of your future. You should be aware of that: both in realizing you can’t wait around for someone to “save” you and also that you can be proud of how far you’ve come.
are you satisfied? — Life isn’t just love: there’s struggles with perception, self-confidence, work, and so on — I don’t know if I can ever be satisfied, and I think the idea of being so fulfilled in life that won’t strive for more seems like such a foreign idea for me. But it’s gotta come to me sometime, right?
vienna — “slow down, you crazy child, you’re so ambitious for a juvenile” — the meme that every girl has such a deep emotional connection to this song… “but then if you’re so smart, tell me, why are you still so afraid? where’s the fire, what’s the hurry about… you better cool it off before you burn it out…” I’m scared of rushing too much, and then burning out (last words of a shooting star) “you’re gonna kick off before you get even halfway through”
please please please let me get what i want this time — the plaintive begging in this song feels so real to me, because sometimes i just want to beg the world to let me take a break, have a win, be better, have SOMETHING to change.
I wanna get better — i love bleachers so so much… <37 how a life can move from darkness she said to get better, so I put a bullet where i shoulda put a helmet… the idea of being inspired to change and heal for the better when you meet someone that inspires you to do so: I didn’t know I was lonely ‘til i saw your face. This is so, so important, and why I think my parents were right when they told me to be careful about who I spent time around. When you’re around those that make you want to be better, the people that jumpstart you from stagnation and make you want to improve, well, truly wanting something is the first step for anything.
your best american girl — This is such an anthem of just wanting to be what others have ever wanted of you. To change yourself so deeply so someone else can’t be without you, but doing this for everyone in your life and thereby losing yourself completely. I find myself doing this a lot and even if it doesn’t seem like this there’s a part of me that’s always trying to change myself, test myself, and see how much I’m willing to give to others… and maybe this is why I think I am so scared to be close and dependent on others. Because I know there is a part of me that will change myself for them, and I dont want that to happen — “and you’re an all-american boy; I guess I couldn’t help trying to be your best American girl”
im so sorry - This song is about taking ownership of the things you’ve done that’s failed or hurt others. That it’s really “about time for anyone telling you off for all yout deeds.” This song is also a bit about taking ownership of the work you’ve done that’s failed or hurt others—similar to I wanna get better, you have to want to do well. “So you gotta fire up, you gotta let go / You’ll never be loved till you’ve made your own”
youth - how to be a human being is one of the greatest albums of all time. how they cooked up something so fundamentally beautiful, real, so encompassing of the human existence, and at the same time making it one of the catchiest albums ever. “you were clearly meant for me, than a life lost in the war. i want you to be happy, free to run, get dizzy on caffeine.” are we meant to be happy?
i did something bad — “I did something bad, so why does it feel so good?” fuck the good girl, docile girl, the slow, gentle girl stereotypes. sometimes, you gotta just do a chaotic thing, a bad thing, something that just gets you what you want. because sometimes you live your entire life wanting to never overstep anything and realize that this audacity is the only way to get things—to ask for things, to believe you deserve something and therefore you start fighting for it, feeling like you should be working towards something. delusion!
reborn — honestly just the constant repeating of “keep moving forward” is so poignant, because life can suck but you just on one truth, and that is that time is a cold, unfeeling master. It will just keep marching forward, and even if you take yourself out of the march, it will just keep going without even looking back.
mastermind — “no one wanted to play with me as a little kid, so I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since, to make them love me and make it seem effortless” i think this specific line hit me so hard. cus no one wanted to play with me as a child, and ever since all I’ve ever wanted was to be liked. I’ve developed so many coping mechanisms and strategies, and these little thought processes to be likable, and I’ve only just started getting over that.
end of me — holy fuck. “am i a fool to picture my own funeral as a real gala affair? everybody’s there, everybody cares about me. am i a wretch to fantasize about my death like it was some big event everybody laments.” Sometimes i think about how I’ll be remembered when I die. Or more like, in the absence of me, am I noticed? Will people wonder, oh, why does it feel different? “will there be anybody to see the death of me?” will my death matter? will my life ever matter? will i ever matter? is it delusional to think that i’ll make an impact? is it insane to “dream about the street on which i live when i am rich, i’ll build a boulevard of piss, i’ll own the block…”
working for the knife — Mitski likely wrote this song about writing songs for others, and how it feels like you’ve never, never enough… “I guess ‘cause I wish I was making things too” — and making things for the “knife” the concept of “capitalism” or making things for profit/benefit vs. self-enjoyment. should I do something that would, I don’t know, give myself some sort of profit, or change the world, or something I love? Maybe I cannot live in a delusion where I’ll just follow my passions forever. Or can I truly live a life where I do not have to do the type of work I hate?
nina cried power — the amazing, inspiring people in the world who have “cried power” who have grabbed power and made an impact — became someone we write songs about today, that we pay homage to in history.8
beautiful things — a scary thing about having things is being able to lose them. This leads us to the quintessential question of “Is it worth it to have a good thing if you know it’ll hurt after?” - whether you should care if you know the ending will hurt. And should this fear stop you?
I love my girl; she’s my boy — “I always hear people say, ‘oh, i want to go somewhere.’ I want to get out of here. So where do you want to go? And if you want to go, why don’t you fix your car, get in, and drive?” We’re young. Life is longer than we think. Humans are capable of incredible things.
But wait, what about yesterday?
I was only five
And had so much to say
Was I just told a lie?
My entire life
Thinking I’d be great
— nickel, flipturn
Footnotes:
An awesome article with drawings of the cities & some analyses! I encourage you to also buy the actual book and try to doodle what you imagine the cities look like. I also made playlists for some of the other cities: zora, dorothea, and eusapia.
It was disproved! So many of these psych studies have been disproved. When I went to Invisible College (a program at Cambridge, UK, run by Works in Progress and Stripe Press; super fun!!) this summer, Stuart Ritchie gave a talk about this — did you know a lot of Kahneman’s studies were shown to not really be extrapolatable?
In many ways, I think Hamilton could be a Greek tragedy. His desire to be remembered, his lack of care for his life in his prioritization of what happens after his death is his hamartia.
Check out C. Thi Nguyen’s writings! He also wrote Games: Agency as Art, which is a banger everyone should read. (He gave a talk at the Workshop back at Andover and I remember talking about it to M allll night.)
In “i’m losing my edge to the aphids” I talk about how I think I learned to become more extroverted through simple patterns and creating tangible personality traits. While it worked quite well, and my life has become much more colorful and happier through the years, I don’t think it’s done as much to fix my feelings of loneliness as much as me being more intentional in being truly myself with people. In conversations with friends, I’ve heard their sturggles as well—of being tired of being reduced to a soundbite. But if you don’t, how do people remember you? Want to get to know you better?
Man, this paragraph (and this entire essay) has so many “I”’s. But it’s because I believe any “advice” essay is really only advice from and for the author alone—for any reader, it is nothing more than leading questions. So many people write these long treatises of what you should do but tbh, that’s pretty bad as some source of truth.
If you’ve ever talked to me at all in the past year, you might already know this. :) I offer a pre-emptive apology to everyone because Jack Antonoff might be all I ever talk about, and I know it gets boring. Along the same lines, here’s literally just interspersed bleachers and hozier. And every bleachers song ever.
Check out Nina Simone and Sinead O’Connor!