Age and the End of Ambition

Source: Pheladiii, Pixabay

I retired two years ago, which threw me (not all at once, but in waves) out of the resume-building, ladder-climbing life I’d known since my early twenties. And it has slowly been relocating my center of gravity from what author David Brooks calls resume virtues to eulogy virtues—from those devoted to earthly success to those devoted to emotional and spiritual fulfillment.

Brooks argues that relinquishing ambition doesn’t mean relinquishing aspiration. The difference is that ambition is the desire to rise higher in the world (it originally meant "striving for favor"), while aspiration is the desire to become a better person. One is about social mobility, the other is about inner transformation—regeneration and renewal, growth and risk-taking, cultivating a feel for what wants to emerge in your life.

The Concept of Second Adolescence

We’ve all been here before, at the place of dreaming our lives, experimenting with them, finding out who we are. It was called adolescence, and some researchers even call the last third of life the second adolescence. Only this one doesn’t come with an entire institutionalized structure designed to encourage the passage from adolescence to adulthood—i.e. an educational system. There’s no degree program in maturity. We’re on our own and have to design our own curriculums. And when we outgrow them, to re-design them.

In my case, this post-career arc has been redirecting me toward such eulogy virtues as community- and relationship-building, writing, music and dancing, time spent in nature and contemplation, in awe and fascination, travel and adventure, political activism, and celebrating the preciousness and brevity of life and love. These activities tend to involve me not so much in serving the world or saving the world (or even succeeding in it), but savoring the world.

This shift in priorities certainly hasn’t happened overnight, though being officially retired did. Anything you do for 50 years will be a hard habit to break, even if you grant yourself a well-deserved stretch of time after retirement to simply knock off and allow your bewildered and ambitious mind—“Where’s my drive?!—to catch up with your new circumstances.

A lifetime of working builds up a tremendous momentum that doesn't end just because the work does. It’s a bit like a head-on collision—the car stops, but the passenger doesn't.

And indeed it’s taken me these couple of years just to assimilate the fact that I’m no longer in possession of a career, no less begin truly looking beneath the surface of what I’d always thought to be so, redefine my priorities, and discover how I want to spend my remaining time before the clock strikes twelve.

Rethinking Desire and Productivity

To be clear, I’m not advocating for some Buddhistic ideal of desirelessness, or some radical shift from “doing” to “being.” Most of us are too brined in the values of productivity, purpose and success to settle for that—even if we could attain it—and it’s damnably hard to be part of a capitalist system and relinquish ambition, which may be its most active ingredient.

Interesting, too, that the word we use to describe our work-lives is “occupation,” yet we seem to overlook its double-entendre. Being occupied can mean being absorbed and engaged in something, but it can also mean being taken over by it, as in an occupied country. Not captivated, but held captive.

Getting older also throws into high relief the fact that time is rushing down the hourglass. And without the demands and distractions of a work-life and all our forward-looking ambitions—and before new aspirations and involvements can take hold—there’s plenty of time to dwell on this brute existential fact. Time, also, to contemplate the sense of irrelevance that can dog anyone who's made the decision to retire, or cut back, or who's reached the third age (roughly 60's and up); that can haunt you to precisely the degree that your sense of self-worth is pegged to your career and it's achievements. Not just irrelevance but erasure. The fear of fading from view, dropping off people’s radar screens, being forgotten—not “being somebody.”

I was recently reminded of this peculiar anxiety (and ambition) when I ran into a friend who’s an Ivy-league professor involved in cutting-edge medical research (and 15 years younger than me). When he asked me what’s new, and I mentioned taking singing lessons, his lukewarm response reminded me that I’m no longer on the ascendant regarding the career arc. I’m on the backside of ambition, the downside of upward mobility. And it stung!

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No wonder most retirement books urge you to get busy again and quick—fill up that calendar, that assumed hole in your sense of identity and purpose—rather than submitting yourself to the hard human work of turning your sights from resume virtues to eulogy virtues, not relying on force to move ahead in life anymore, but on surrender—letting go of your grip on the wishbone.

To say nothing of the gulping realization that even 50 years of your mightiest ambitions to change the world—or conquer it—barely moved the needle, which can bring on a loss of motive power, of interest in not just old goals and ambitions, but new ones.
On the other hand, it may increase your hunger to do things for their own sake, for the love and learning of it, the passion and not just the payoff, and to tackle what some people consider one of the primary developmental tasks of successful aging, which is relinquishing profit motives in general. That is, the demand for results.

As for that, anyone faced with throttling back on ambition might take comfort from something called the Terman Life-Cycle Study—the 2nd longest-running longitudinal study in the field of psychology (70 years)—which found that ambition correlates with success but not happiness, well-being, or longevity, especially if your achievements fail to match your ambitions.

Liberation in Surrendering Ambition

By the time you reach midlife you may already have experienced something of the limitations of ambition, as well as time and talent. Maybe you’ve noticed a tempering of your fight and your drive, and that the energy it takes to fuel your ambition isn’t in the batteries to the same degree it was when you were younger.

Maybe you’ve surrendered the infiniteness of your ambitions, and maybe it’s a surrender that feels like defeat. But it’s also a kind of liberation. You know better where you stand with life, and can begin to reorder your priorities.

But again, it’s critical to understand that relinquishing ambition doesn’t mean you can’t cultivate aspiration, and that this isn’t just linguistic hair-splitting. Professional ambition and resume virtues tend to elbow aside values that may ultimately be more important, and require that you constantly compare yourself with other people. Aspiration and eulogy virtues don’t.