What Does Life After Ambition Actually Look Like?
Millennials love to talk—and gripe—about ambition. What was once a virtue has become a generational bugbear. Millennial women, raised on Girl Power and rom-coms in which the heroine gets the job and the man, joined the workforce just in time for the girlboss culture of the 2010s, which promised that hard work would lead not only to personal success but also to feminist victory. For many American women, no piece of that promise has come true. And, gender aside, anyone who’s gone through two recessions, a pandemic, and the growing precarity of all kinds of careers has reason to side-eye grand dreams of achievement; it’s hard enough to just get by. No wonder that cries of protest such as the Canadian writer Amil Niazi’s 2022 lament, “Losing My Ambition,” in which Niazi declares that she’s “abandoned the notion of ambition to chase the absolute middle of the road: mediocrity,” have gone viral.
Niazi has not given up completely on achievement: She parlayed her hit essay into a new book called Life After Ambition: A “Good Enough” Memoir. In it, she tries to trace the rise and fall of her aspirations as both a personal and a cultural story, framing her gradual disillusionment as a larger meditation on the limits of ambition as a guiding ethic. She describes setting aside her childhood literary dreams as she became overreliant on achievement as a source of self-worth—an issue to which many readers will likely relate, though it’s an especially tough proposition in the media world, which has become increasingly unstable in Millennials’ working lives. Niazi swings between journalistic writing, editing, and production before she lands a job in the BBC’s commissioning department.
But once she’s in that coveted role, motherhood reorients her priorities: She no longer wants work that separates her from her baby. This, too, will be readily relatable. But a less common aspect of her experience—and one Niazi does not explain satisfyingly—is that parenthood also reawakened her urge toward a kind of writing that, she notes, “had very little to do with journalism.” As a new mother, she found that the “urge to create felt overwhelming.” Before having a second baby, she quit her job.
For Niazi, abandoning ambition seems to have meant giving up on a career that the girlbosses of 10 years ago would have admired—one that involves climbing up the rungs of a major media company. But for many of her readers, success might well be what Niazi now has: a widely released memoir and a popular New York magazine column that she describes as a “perfect culmination” of her prior work. Niazi never really delves into this disconnect. And strangely, for someone who mentions that writing is “the only thing I’d ever been both good at and interested in, where I didn’t feel like I was faking it,” she rarely explores her creative urge. In fact, she seems to shy away from any real exploration of what literary ambition means.
For a quest meant to “navigate what a divorce from ‘ambition’ really looks like,” Niazi’s memoir gives its audience little sense of why she continues to pursue writing, or what her relationship to literary craft is. So much of writing is battling your own mind to cough up the clearest idea or best word. Niazi doesn’t discuss the frustrations or satisfactions of this process. Her book may leave readers wondering what aspect of writing compels her most, if it isn’t public success or the private drive to perfect a sentence. As a result, Life After Ambition raises an intriguing question: If conventional visions of success strike so many as bankrupt, how can writers earnestly reclaim—or even hold on to—ambition for art?
As I was reading Life After Ambition, I thought wistfully of another recent memoir about writing: the New Yorker journalist and author Susan Orlean’s immensely heartfelt career retrospective, Joyride. Midway through, Orlean observes that to be “empowered to write, to feel entitled to broadcast your thoughts to the world, is an honor.” Orlean has been broadcasting her thoughts in print for decades, and Joyride is at once her expression of gratitude for that career and a tale of life lived in service to her fundamental drive to write.
Orlean is precise about her motivations. She repeatedly describes her desire to write something fascinating and stylish enough to deserve a stranger’s time—and then do it again, and again, and again. This is an unusual if not unique form of ambition, and Orlean illustrates it vividly. One of her goals, it seems, is to bring her obsession with writing to life for somebody who does not share it. She even makes the composition process—hours alone at her desk—sound dramatic, at one point comparing it with “walking along a narrow ledge and willing yourself to not look down: If you do, you’ll lose your nerve, and you’ll fall.” She then argues that the “single essential element” of quality prose is the confidence it takes to look straight ahead on that ledge. “You need swagger to be a writer at all,” she continues, “to be convinced that readers should listen to you.”
Such explicit writing about writing is a performance of both confidence and ambition: Orlean seems to want to put on such a great show that it compels you to go read her whole catalog. Niazi does show a certain devil-may-care swagger by describing Life After Ambition as merely “good enough,” which all but dares readers to dismiss it. (The phrase presumably winks at the child psychologist D. W. Winnicott’s idea of the “good enough” mother but doesn’t explicitly connect the dots.) In doing so, though, she lowers her audience’s expectations. Orlean, in Joyride, does the opposite. She gives her solitary craft an urgency that cannot help but make readers inspect, and then appreciate, the quality of her writing. Repeatedly she promises that her sentences can rivet and enlighten you; repeatedly, they do just that.
Joyride, it seems to me, is an expression of ambition at its purest in that Orlean achieves the very goals—good storytelling and good prose—that the book discusses. But she never tangles with the tricky nexus of internal and external aspiration, likely because her career has gone so well. Though she does not completely omit her setbacks and times of doubt, she seems to understand that readers might not take seriously the professional insecurities of a writer whom Meryl Streep once played in a movie. Joyride remains squarely in the realm of interior, artistic ambition. It’s about Orlean’s determination to produce better and better work.
Life After Ambition, in contrast, mostly inhabits the realm of the external, and it does not put on a stylistic show. Life After Ambition’s sentences are workmanlike, with an overreliance on set or hackneyed phrases; there’s a lot of “brokenness,” “broken state,” “what was broken in me.” Niazi appears uninterested in asserting her voice on the page, a lack of literary care that seems connected to her tendency—odd in a memoir—to nudge away from introspection.
[Read: A society that can’t get enough of work]
For instance, she recounts several moments in which a teacher, manager, or partner derided her ambition, treating it as unacceptable given her race or gender. Not wishing to linger on the emotional repercussions of these hurtful incidents is understandable, of course. Still, Niazi treats them with a distinct impersonality, largely using them to gesture at her story’s wider applicability (ambition “becomes a funny thing,” she writes, “when it’s used against you”) and to create a sense that her ambition allowed her to break away from bigots’ and sexists’ idea of who she was supposed to be.
Niazi’s writing about her career moves also shows some unease with the personal. She grew up poor, and the ambition she describes most explicitly is her very relatable desire to “make money and move up the ladder and have a stable life.” As any writer or journalist reading Life After Ambition will know, achieving these goals in tandem can be challenging in media. In fact, making money is sometimes at odds with getting what you want. Niazi is admirably transparent about this reality: At one point, she recounts taking a $20,000 pay cut to work at a new media start-up where her role would involve more writing than her prior one. But she refrains from discussing the emotions or conversations that went into that decision, tucking it instead into a passage about trying for her first pregnancy. Taking a winding or risky career path is common, regardless of one’s background, but it’s often still fraught—and, therefore, ripe for investigation, especially in a book meant to probe ambition. Niazi shows her readers her choices; she just doesn’t tell us what they mean.
None of this would seem all that jarring if Niazi used her desire to write to give readers a deeper idea of who she is. But she doesn’t show herself drafting or consider its frustrations and satisfactions; readers never get to see her wobble on Orlean’s narrow ledge. It is as if Niazi expects her audience either to intuit the reason she pursued writing or not to care, rather than treating her literary yearning as a subject worthy of consideration and time.
In this sense, Life After Ambition is legitimately and heartbreakingly unambitious. Reading it, I wondered whether Niazi didn’t trust that she could interest readers in her real self. The memoir turns instead into a broad and essentially familiar discourse about ambition as a route out of challenging family circumstances; the pursuit of conventional success leading to alienation; the frequent clash between career and parenthood.
Perhaps a serious literary consideration of ambition, one that breaks through the shell of Millennial disillusionment that has hardened around the subject in recent years, would need to follow Orlean’s lead in focusing on craft. After all, it takes confidence to talk about your art—and to get away from convention. In the hip-hop scholar Tricia Rose’s seminal Black Noise, the graffiti writer and rapper Fab Five Freddy tells Rose that what makes his art satisfying is “that pressure on you to be the best. Or to try to be the best. To develop a new style nobody can deal with.” A goal like that might torment you, and it might end in failure nine times out of 10, but the most common complaint about conventional ambition is that it so often turns into a trap. If your goal is to chase artistic innovation, to try to tell the best story or put on the best show you can, then effort becomes its own reward.