On Ambition II: Still Hating Yourself and Loving It
A man's worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions.
-- Marcus Aurelius
If you would attain to what you are not yet, you must always be displeased by what you are. For where you are pleased with yourself there you have remained. Keep adding, keep walking, keep advancing.
-- St. Augustine
Ambition has its disappointments to sour us, but never the good fortune to satisfy us. Its appetite grows keener by indulgence and all we can gratify it with at present serves but the more to inflame its insatiable desires.
-- Benjamin Franklin
Desire is the root of evil.
-- Gautama Siddharta
After focusing on real life for a while, I suppose it's time to return to the question of ambition that I've been avoiding because it feels like I need to write a thesis. Which I don't have time to write. But here are some casual thoughts on the replies below.
I'm not angry at my parents, and it doesn't feel right to me that others should condemn them for the way I was raised. As Adam said, I understand their motivation. Maybe it has a lot to do with the fact that my mother grew up in fairly horrific circumstances. One of ten children, she survived the Cultural Revolution by eating scraps and vermin before swimming to Hong Kong at the age of 22 to escape. I don't think anyone who hasn't experienced that kind of poverty and hardship can possibly understand what it takes to survive. I can philosophically ponder the necessity of ambition on the internet like a wanker; to my mother, ruthless tenacity and the relentless drive to succeed were needed just to keep from dying and climb out of the gutter.
Actually, I find I often connect with children-of-immigrants because they have a similar relationship with their parents. When people survive a war, or famine, or the Holocaust, or some kind of displacement, and manage to pick themselves up and move across the world to find a better life, they frequently seem to come out of it with a similar appreciation of ambition and hard work. Or maybe it was in their temperament to begin with, and that's why they immigrated. Chicken/egg.
Abuse is a very loaded word. I do not consider myself abused, but I don't know where I draw the line on what "abuse" is. Certainly, sexual abuse is abuse. Beating. Malicious intent. Neglect. Beyond that, it's hard for me to say exactly what is absolutely right and wrong. Who sets the standard? I'm sure I could point to any parent on the planet and find something in their technique to call abuse; all parents make mistakes. When does a mistake become abuse? When does it even become a mistake?
My mother considers the laissez-faire parenting practices of many Western families to be child abuse. I'm not kidding; she's expressed this opinion many times. A classmate of mine was very intelligent but didn't study or perform well academically; my mother privately criticized her parents for not having the courage and strength to push their child to achieve. To her, failing to engender ambition in one's children is akin to failing to teach them moral values or the basic skills needed to survive in the world. My mother has the same reaction to the "Be proud of yourself! Just do your best! Be whatever you want to be!" style of parenting as (I assume) you have watching incompetent parents struggle with their undisciplined, useless brats on Nanny 911 or Maury. She just draws the line in a different place. "Why wouldn't every good parent want their child to succeed, to be the best?"
It's easy to read my last entry on ambition and assume I had a deeply unhappy childhood, but I really didn't. There were moments of disappointment, awkwardness, unhappiness - sure, even terror - but I also remember distinctly not wanting to grow up because I loved the life I led. I was taught to love learning, and I was never denied the fulfillment of that desire. I loved achieving, and I loved being the smart kid. I was given a lot of trust and social self-determination. I never wanted materially, and was treated to ridiculous experiences way beyond our socio-economic status, like family trips overseas and a hoity-toity private school that I loved attending -- for god's sake, I went to Space Camp. When I recall my childhood, it averages out to a pretty good one overall.
Similarly, I can see that some people might assume that I'm so driven to succeed that I don't enjoy my life because it's a means to an end. No -- if that were the case, I'd be writing this blog entry between treating patients. I love what I do now, and I can't think of anything I've done in the last five years that was purely a means to an end and not personally fulfilling on its own (aside from a few jobs I've taken to pay rent). I've always believed the journey should be just as wonderful as the destination (which is why I really don't care if someone "spoils" a good movie for me).
So, why this discussion? As the title of these posts makes clear, I have one heck of a love/hate relationship with ambition, and I think ambition is one of the most ambivalently viewed human traits -- in any culture. We strive for contentment, but when someone claims to be content in a state we consider unworthy, we deride them for not being ambitious. Some consider ambition a dirty word and try to rid themselves of all desire (an endeavor which becomes an ambition in itself?). Others see this approach as a kind of oppression invented or re-purposed by those who wish to keep society static. Some believe that without ambition we are nothing. Others believe that ambition makes us slaves.
Do we want ambition, or don't we? How much do we want to achieve in life, and at what cost? Can ambition be turned off like a switch in order to achieve contentment, or does the abandonment of ambition cause a slow sink into resentment and self-loathing? Is there an acceptable middle ground?
I don't advocate paying too high a cost, but if you really believe that my experience was so terrible ... well, to paraphrase Bill Hicks a little: name ten people whose achievements you place in the highest regard, and I guarantee you that most of them will have a drive resulting from some hole in their self-esteem, probably created in their upbringing by their parents. Einstein may not have been gagged and put in a sack (that we know of), but Leopold Mozart placed *far* more pressure on young Wolfgang than my mother ever placed on me (jms, you didn't really think I was going to let that slide, did you?). Are we willing to give up the idea of operating at full potential and the possible results for the sake of a happy childhood or adult contentment? Is it a bad thing that I look at what I've done, and always think to myself, "It's not enough"? Isn't that what keeps one adding, walking, advancing?
The truth is, as much as ambition cripples my self-worth, I fucking love the rush of achieving. I love the motivation it gives me. I love the fact that I can make myself do amazing things by thinking myself into a hole and clawing my way out of it creatively. I love the competition, real or invented. I love the sense of primal satisfaction I feel a moment before I tell myself I'm not good enough, the job's not yet finished, and I ride off to slay another dragon.
But I don't know if it's right to love it.
[Incidentally: on this day, exactly twenty years ago, my mother was admitted to a psych ward for the first time. Ugh, no, don't weep for me or her, I just thought it was interesting.]
Labels: childhood, culturobabble, psychobabble
posted by Melissa Dunphyat
14:04
5 Comments:
The abuse question is simple: Imagine it being done to he or she whom you love best when he or she was a small child. If your gut instinct is to rescue him or her, it's abusive. The more intense the reaction, the more intense the abuse. Ambition can be instilled in children without putting their sense of self-worth in peril (and I agree, rah rah childrahring is not the way to do this either).
I think a lot of abused adults who otherwise had happy or privileged childhoods tend to discount or minimize the damage of the abuse they suffered as you do. Especially is they are accomplished. They weigh each side of the scale, and figure that since numerically, the positive wins out and they're mostly doing well now, they have no right to be angry and outraged. After all it could have been worse, right?? The problem with this calculus, however, is that for a child, 364 days of love, gifts, and privilege will never erase the one day of the year that a parent called you a worthless cunt and slapped you across the face. That one day throws the meaning of all the other days in doubt. Those things linger, and especially for children, it becomes integrated into the story they tell themselves about who they are and what they are worth. Yes, rational adults have the ability to recover from these abuses, but you know... AA 101. You can't recover if you don't think there is/was a problem.
The problem isn't your ambition, Melissa, it's your self-esteem. You are pretty much a textbook case of "fragile high self-esteem." You're motivated to work so hard because you need the continuous validation. No one likes to fail of course, but the idea of failure should not incite a sense of panic and self-annihilation. It seems like mere platitude, but one is more than what they do or accomplish, and one can fail without being a failure. Folks with fragile high self-esteem tend to have an incredibly hard time processing that idea, or else outright reject it.
The sad irony is that it's the very attributes of this dysfunctional mind set that makes it so difficult for those who suffer from it to recognize it in the first place, much less accept, then change it. Hearing that there is a problem with your self esteem (or even thinking it in your head) triggers all the ego-threat defense mechanisms that go with this problem - self-aggrandizement, condescension, hyperdefensiveness, self-distracting with esteem building tasks, and, if all that fails, aggressiveness and lashing out.
Unfortunately none of those tactics get you any closer to the root of the problem, which is figuring out how to replace fragile high self esteem with actual secure self esteem.
There are insanely accomplished folks who are simply OCD, soft bi-polars, or otherwise motivated by a mentality that does not have secret self-loathing at its root. Your motivation, however, does. That's what's wrong with it.
Not sure if you meant your post to be illuminating or not, but ... both this and my previous post on the subject were titled "Hating yourself and loving it." So, pretty sure I'm both aware of the self-loathing aspect of my cognitive schema and I don't keep it particularly "secret."
Then again (and here again is one of the points of my posts), who are you or anyone else to say that this is definitively "a problem" or "wrong"? Are the accomplishments of those with low self esteem any less valid because of the self-loathing? I can think of quite a bit of amazing creative art that has self-loathing at its very root. Do all these artists have something inherently "wrong" with them that needs fixin'?
I don't believe your "simple" answer to the abuse question solves much; everyone given that scenario will still draw that line in a different place. I'm quite sure my mother would draw it in a different place to you. Are entire cultures that advocate guilt-based child-rearing morally unworthy (cultural relativism be damned)? Does your moral code override that of hundreds of millions of Chinese, for example? Plenty of them would scoff at your sensitivity and claim that if such treatment benefited their best-loved, it would be worth it. I've even heard my (step)grandmother (paternal, Chinese) complaining that she wasn't pushed and ridden by her parents the way her brothers were. She blames her parents for not loving her enough to put her on the road to success.
Seriously, I don't know what your culture is, but I'm splat-bang in the middle of two, and the disconnect between what each sees as morally acceptable in child-rearing is kind of incredible. They think you're just as wrong as you think they are.
@anonymous:
There are a couple of things that I'd like to point to in your post, as I don't quite get the point.
1. You seem to think that your gut instinct is always right, in every situation. I have a lot of respect for gut instincts generally (especially after reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell) but there are times where they're misleading. If you're an expert in child abuse or child psychology, then your gut is probably more intelligent on this subject than your brain is. Otherwise, it's probably worth considering whether every other gut in the world would agree with yours.
2. I find this thought interesting: "I think a lot of abused adults who otherwise had happy or privileged childhoods tend to discount or minimize the damage of the abuse they suffered as you do."
It sounds like minimising suffering is a form of self-delusion - like you're saying "you're damaged... so act like it"
3. At the end you say "There are insanely accomplished folks who are simply OCD, soft bi-polars, or otherwise motivated by a mentality that does not have secret self-loathing at its root. Your motivation, however, does. That's what's wrong with it."
Are you saying that accomplishing something while suffering from OCD or some other non-self-loathing disorder is somehow better than accomplishing that same thing while motivated by a need to accomplish something?
To both you and Adam, you're missing the point on gut instinct, which is that abuse is first and foremost a subjective experience. It doesn't matter where I or your parents or anyone else draws the line. The question is, where do you draw the line? Never mind defending and rationalizing your mother's behavior, or entire cultures for that matter. Would you do this to a child? How did you feel when it was happening to you? If it feels abusive to you, it is abusive - to you.
I'm narrowing your focus because your internal experience is a separate thing from culture. And in fact, all of those cultural arguments are pretty irrelevant to the question of how did you feel when you were in a burlap sack wondering if your parents would drown you. If culture was sufficient to thwart internal reality, there would be no gay people in the deeply homophobic parts of the world. The fact that your culture might tell you that this behavior shouldn't be classified as abusive does not mean that such behavior doesn't feel abusive. It's how you feel that makes it abusive.
Any good parent understands the importance of the subjective experience of abuse, and especially if they have more than one child, they very quickly learn their child's temperament and that each may have very different levels of tolerance for harsh words or punishment. What might roll off one child's back might be terribly upsetting and disturbing to another, so they adjust their penalties accordingly.
Mormolyke, I conclude that your low self-esteem is a problem because you've identified it as a problem. That it motivates you to great accomplishment is clearly no longer sufficient compensation for how awful it makes you feel when you don't, or how it causes you to behave in ways that damage your primary relationships when those people seem to threaten your accomplishments. Hence, your questioning and attempts at rationalization.
Adam, I don't need to say "you've been abused, act like it." Mormolyke is acting like it, and, moreover, saying it herself. Fragile high self-esteem doesn't just crop out of nothing. Honestly, isn't it odd to simultaneously bemoan one's low self-esteem (accomplishments aside) while simultaneously clinging to the notion that one was not abused or neglected? It's logically inconsistent. The few happy well-loved people I know who were not abused or neglected have no need to ask themselves the questions you're asking.
To the question of art, of course many of these highly creative people have something wrong with them that needs "fixin'". Isn't that obvious? What on earth do you think they're trying to achieve with their art? Most of them are also, for the very fact that there is something wrong with them, horrible spouses, friends, lovers, sons/daughters, and parents. The question to you is: are you willing to continue to be broken in the name of "art", "reknown", or whatever it is that motivates you, even if it threatens your ability to be those things to the people you care about?
I'm not even trying to be facetious. I'm surrounded by artists, I know almost no one but artists. So I understand the seriousness of asking yourself that question. Some decide yes. Some decide no. Some continue to make fine art regardless of the answer. Some stop making fine art regardless of the answer.
So, Mormolyke, what do you want?
I think a lot of people with fragile high self-esteem prefer to live with the ambiguity of their own emotional states in part out of the fear that being different (read: "less" driven) will make them less accomplished (which translates as failure in their thinking). Of course, secure self-esteem does not lead to failure. What it does lead to is a change in value systems, and therefore, priorities and goals. What one sees as success or failure changes.
Good luck to you.
Two quick notes:
1) Our friend Amber is possibly the least driven person I know. She is also possibly the most happy, kind, humble, and talented. So I guess that's a point against ambition.
2) Ambition, as a defining character trait, lands you in Slytherin House at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. So, in my book, that's a point FOR ambition. I mean, you get to hang out with Alan Rickman.
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