it was a SOCIAL EXPERIMENT!
Let's discuss, Ambition: The Secret Passion for a moment, which is actually a double issue -- the one being the, admittedly terrible, title of a book by Joseph Epstein, published in 1980, supposedly "a wide-ranging look at success in America" and the other being, well, ambition itself, I suppose, in all its undefinable glory.
As you may or may not know from my occasional blithering on the subject, I am quite fond of sociology texts: multidisciplinary books with a healthy dose of history and cultural analysis. I read Ambition as a twi-night doubleheader with Daniel McGinn's House Lust: America's Obsession With Our Homes because I am also quite fond of trying to suss out the lives and motivations of people whose outlook on life seems utterly polarized from my own. On the subject of people and the enormous homes they inhabit or deeply desire to inhabit, I remain fairly puzzled, but then I'm pretty much a Palladian at heart: balance and proportion. Although I will admit that the sheer level of obsession with square footage in the book did prompt me to measure my own digs because it's not the kind of apartment building where the square footage is even on the table.
For the record I currently inhabit 542.4 square feet of space, including the bathroom, NOT including the closets.
As for Ambition, it was very cool as a series of profiles of famously ambitious people (Henry Ford, John D. Rockafeller, Henry Luce, Joe Kennedy, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, etc.). Epstein is kind of snobbish (which, he did write Snobbery: The American Version recently so it's not like I didn't expect it. Also: I can be more than a little snobbish myself) and fogeyish and there are NO not-white people in his reckoning of the famously ambitious and hardly any women (even if Edith Wharton is clearly awesome and I really want to have a drink or two with her now), but he's not pretending that his is an impartial, anthropological observation. As an exercise, it was an interesting epigraph for "high" society, which he basically puts down as having died right around the time that reporters started covering crazy-expensive "high" society weddings. The part of the book that falters is his half-hearted stab at ferreting out why someone would chose against ambition. And by, "ambition," he seems to mean exclusively that 1950s rat race-type mentality and not a more progressive definition where ambition, like other things, becomes more individualized and subjective.
Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety suffered from the same problem, although Botton does not come out so decidedly on either side of the issue as Epstein does. I don't really see "traditional" success/status as being inevitably at war with "bohemian" success/status. I suppose I see it more like the Greek/independent dynamic from college. Sure, there were those who hated the frats -- on occasion I was one of those people -- and there were those who thought that independents were all hopelessly uncool people who secretly desired to be part of the Greek scene. But for the vast majority of people, these were societies within the larger designation of "College" and they all had their own rules and hierarchies. A D&D clique kid would not actually want to hang out with the Betas or vice versa, but I think that sometimes that can be hard to understand.
But am I ambitious? I don't know, to be honest. I know I don't care to be a Henry Ford or a Rockafeller. As mercuryfading has recently said, financial security is important to me, but what that means is that I can afford myself. I don't want or need a vacation home in, like, Belize, but I would like to be able to cover my own expenses beyond basic food and shelter. I suppose the ambitious part of that is that I actually did give up a job where I had that because I think I should also be in a field that I find engaging and fulfilling beyond the strictly monetary.
Only I'm not sure that's all there is to it. Because, even if there aren't heaps of money in the museum/arts field, there is prestige and I'd be lying if I said that didn't matter to my own egotism. It's a weird world where you get loads more attention at parties as a totally unpaid Smithsonian intern than you did as a self-sufficient bureaucrat. While I try to keep my lifestyle manageable (and, honestly, if they're going to carve anything on my tombstone "a manageable life" might be it, and, come to think of it, my perception of what it would be like to try to keep an enormous house up to my type A standard of cleanliness might be a part of my aversion to huge houses), it's a real eye-opener to achieve something you think you want, something you think of as the termination of a particular dream or hope or ambition only to find that there's this door just over the finish line for you to open and behind it are all the things that didn't happen in the course of meeting that goal, things that might have gone better or things that are still left undone.
As you may or may not know from my occasional blithering on the subject, I am quite fond of sociology texts: multidisciplinary books with a healthy dose of history and cultural analysis. I read Ambition as a twi-night doubleheader with Daniel McGinn's House Lust: America's Obsession With Our Homes because I am also quite fond of trying to suss out the lives and motivations of people whose outlook on life seems utterly polarized from my own. On the subject of people and the enormous homes they inhabit or deeply desire to inhabit, I remain fairly puzzled, but then I'm pretty much a Palladian at heart: balance and proportion. Although I will admit that the sheer level of obsession with square footage in the book did prompt me to measure my own digs because it's not the kind of apartment building where the square footage is even on the table.
For the record I currently inhabit 542.4 square feet of space, including the bathroom, NOT including the closets.
As for Ambition, it was very cool as a series of profiles of famously ambitious people (Henry Ford, John D. Rockafeller, Henry Luce, Joe Kennedy, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, etc.). Epstein is kind of snobbish (which, he did write Snobbery: The American Version recently so it's not like I didn't expect it. Also: I can be more than a little snobbish myself) and fogeyish and there are NO not-white people in his reckoning of the famously ambitious and hardly any women (even if Edith Wharton is clearly awesome and I really want to have a drink or two with her now), but he's not pretending that his is an impartial, anthropological observation. As an exercise, it was an interesting epigraph for "high" society, which he basically puts down as having died right around the time that reporters started covering crazy-expensive "high" society weddings. The part of the book that falters is his half-hearted stab at ferreting out why someone would chose against ambition. And by, "ambition," he seems to mean exclusively that 1950s rat race-type mentality and not a more progressive definition where ambition, like other things, becomes more individualized and subjective.
Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety suffered from the same problem, although Botton does not come out so decidedly on either side of the issue as Epstein does. I don't really see "traditional" success/status as being inevitably at war with "bohemian" success/status. I suppose I see it more like the Greek/independent dynamic from college. Sure, there were those who hated the frats -- on occasion I was one of those people -- and there were those who thought that independents were all hopelessly uncool people who secretly desired to be part of the Greek scene. But for the vast majority of people, these were societies within the larger designation of "College" and they all had their own rules and hierarchies. A D&D clique kid would not actually want to hang out with the Betas or vice versa, but I think that sometimes that can be hard to understand.
But am I ambitious? I don't know, to be honest. I know I don't care to be a Henry Ford or a Rockafeller. As mercuryfading has recently said, financial security is important to me, but what that means is that I can afford myself. I don't want or need a vacation home in, like, Belize, but I would like to be able to cover my own expenses beyond basic food and shelter. I suppose the ambitious part of that is that I actually did give up a job where I had that because I think I should also be in a field that I find engaging and fulfilling beyond the strictly monetary.
Only I'm not sure that's all there is to it. Because, even if there aren't heaps of money in the museum/arts field, there is prestige and I'd be lying if I said that didn't matter to my own egotism. It's a weird world where you get loads more attention at parties as a totally unpaid Smithsonian intern than you did as a self-sufficient bureaucrat. While I try to keep my lifestyle manageable (and, honestly, if they're going to carve anything on my tombstone "a manageable life" might be it, and, come to think of it, my perception of what it would be like to try to keep an enormous house up to my type A standard of cleanliness might be a part of my aversion to huge houses), it's a real eye-opener to achieve something you think you want, something you think of as the termination of a particular dream or hope or ambition only to find that there's this door just over the finish line for you to open and behind it are all the things that didn't happen in the course of meeting that goal, things that might have gone better or things that are still left undone.