The Problem is Not Ambition — It’s Bullshit Jobs and Bullshit Metrics

Our Society Depends Upon Skillful Striving. Here’s the Case For It.

There is increasing momentum behind a movement that I’ll call broadly “anti-ambition.” Loosely defined, the anti-ambition crowd says that we place too much emphasis on work and striving and it’s bad for us as individuals and for us as a society. While there is some merit to this argument, it paints in too broad strokes. There is a whole lot of nuance when it comes to ambition and striving and it’s worth unpacking.

For starters, we need, and depend, on ambitious people. For example, I am certainly glad Kati Kariko, the researcher who worked tirelessly for years pushing the science of mRNA until vaccines were finally developed, was ambitious. She spent hours and hours in dark labs pushing the envelope of science. And that is incontestably a good thing.

I think Kariko is a prime example of the fact that if you are pursuing something meaningful then it is not hard to go quite hard and feel mostly good about it. Research shows that motivation is directly linked to the meaningfulness of a goal and the working conditions under which it is being pursued. Perhaps this is why craftspeople and artists rarely complain about overwork.

Meanwhile, the research of the late anthropologist David Graeber found that between 37 and 40 percent of people believe, in Graeber’s words, they have “bullshit jobs.” A bullshit job is one that nobody would notice if it were gone. Perhaps it would even make things better if it were gone.

Even worse than a bullshit job is when meaningful jobs (like being a physician, for example) are getting overwhelmed by bullshit work (like crazy administrative burdens and requirements). Nothing is more soul crushing than when this happens, nothing.

Is it any surprise, then, that droves of people are leaving their jobs? Of course not. If you have a bullshit job it is very hard to be ambitious about it. So the first problem is not that people aren’t ambitious. It’s that we have too many bullshit jobs and are even turning some good jobs bad.

Another big ambition problem is that we live in a world of superficial metrics. In The Practice of…