I’ve discovered that ambition–true lasting ambition–is rare. By that I mean that most people want a job and a life that is simple and routine. There is rarely a desire for more in the faces of my students. Even in terms of the rappers I hear out in the world that ‘ambition’ amounts to little more than copycat excursions towards a life that has a lot of stuff in it but no deeper purpose. I have yet to define what ambition is. Like grit it defies traditional definition but we all sense it when we see it and I, frankly, do not see it enough.
Why does any of this matter? Because I feel like we are continuing to slip into a hive mentality in our nation. We have far too many worker bees and far too few free thinkers and people designed to develop drastic change. We are, in my opinion, a country heading towards a decline and we are running out of ways to still go up intellectually.
How this happened hasn’t fully coalesced in my understanding. What I have discovered through working at a community college is that for most ambition is overrated. Most students have goals best associated with what I describe as low hanging fruit. I am surrounded by a horde of nurses and not one has announced an interest in being a doctor. They are all about short cuts and following orders and getting paid as fast as possible… but to what end? So you can take that vacation and snap photos of yourself on some foreign beach?
I feel this more and more on the days I play the cyclical Madden 20. I’m going nowhere in that game, and yet I enjoy it. I feel many model such lives. I feel that many more think that this is ordinary or at the least okay. Maybe it is okay for most, but without the drivers to lead us into a better tomorrow, we will always remain slaves of a system whose biproduct is the very lack of ambition I am railing against.
Still, I have no notion of what to do about it.