One muggy night in the summer of 2021, I found myself livestreaming a panic attack on Instagram.
I was tired of doomscrolling through pandemic news and thought I’d take my mind off it by practicing my promotional spiel for my newly launched mental-health newsletter. It proved to be a bad idea. As viewers trickled in, I noticed the ominous hum of anxiety in my chest that I’ve grown familiar with over years of living with generalized anxiety disorder. Within seconds I was spiraling, sweating, and struggling to breathe — but I kept the camera on. “This is what a panic attack looks like, folks,” I stammered.
As the haze slowly lifted, I felt ashamed. What was I thinking, being so pathetic in front of strangers? Why didn’t I just stop? Then someone commented, “Hearing you speak right now is bliss!” The flutter of heart emojis on my screen consoled me.
It also dawned on me that my unfiltered performance had inadvertently served my original plan: building my brand as an “authentic” and “vulnerable” mental-health storyteller to attract more readers to my newsletter. It’s still not easy for me to admit it, but that night I used my pain to feed my professional ambition.
In a previous job, burnout nearly killed me, and I vowed to never let ambition swallow me again. Then came the pandemic. The media startup I was working at shut down, and my 15-year career imploded overnight. In a desperate attempt to cobble together an income, I started writing a newsletter based on my lifelong experience with multiple mental illnesses: anxiety, depression, episodes of hypomania, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Three years later, the newsletter continues to be my main livelihood. It has allowed me to spread awareness about mental illness, become part of a powerful global advocacy network, and access coveted career opportunities, including a fellowship at Oxford. In the process, ambition has come barging back into my life.
I’ve repeatedly succumbed to the urge to do more — hawk my work more aggressively, reel in more subscribers, create more impact — despite a voice in my head warning me of the danger of sliding back into a dark space, reminding me that more will never be enough. There’s a fine line between the motivation needed to build a successful career and the uncontrolled ambition that ends in burnout. As I unpacked this predicament in therapy, I began to wonder: How did ambition become such a force in our world? At what point does it turn on us? And is there a way out?
In the ancient world, ambition was seen as a curse. The Roman philosophers Cicero and Seneca denounced it as a “malady” that preyed on “the greatest souls,” as William Casey King wrote in his book “Ambition, A History: From Vice to Virtue.” For centuries the desire for rank, fame, or power was abhorred as a “plague” and a “canker on the soul.” To be ambitious was to be a threat to order.
During the age of colonialism, ambition underwent a radical makeover as Western imperialists shrewdly created “incentives to encourage potential emigrants to undertake colonization,” King wrote. Ambition was channeled toward civilizing the “uncivilized” and became a virtue, even as it legitimized oppression to devastating effect.
It isn’t difficult to trace those roots to the rise of extractive capitalism: The ambitious entrepreneur sets out to “make the world a better place,” a pursuit that paves the way for self-actualization, power, and wealth — and frequently leaves people and the planet as collateral damage. Winners don’t quit. Keep calm and carry on.
What’s driving many people back to the grind isn’t ambition. It’s survival.
Granted, ambition has also driven people throughout history to challenge oppressive systems, but the “onwards and upwards” narrative erases the reality that an individual’s capacity for achieving success is shaped by factors far beyond their control. In 2018, across the world’s richest countries, only about half of 15-year-olds from households of low socioeconomic status said they expected to complete any kind of higher education, compared with more than 80% from high-status households who said the same. Children whose parents hold a college degree or the equivalent are 45 percentage points more likely to graduate from college than children whose parents earned less than a high-school degree or the equivalent. They’re also more likely to be in good health and have more disposable income. Elsewhere, researchers have found that children growing up in households reporting economic hardship are likely to perform worse in school, report having worse mental health, experience greater social isolation, and engage in more risky behavior relative to peers.
It took a pandemic to blow holes in the cult of ambition. In 2021 and 2022, almost 100 million American workers left their jobs. Many who remained quiet quit, resolving to do no more than the bare minimum. The New York Times declared it the “age of anti-ambition.” Time magazine announced, “Ambition is out.” “A bigger paycheck? I’d rather watch the sunset!” The Guardian said.
The Great Resignation gave way to the Big Stay: Amid brutal mass layoffs and the ballooning cost of living, workers returned to hustling. In one recent survey of Americans, nearly half the respondents said they lived from paycheck to paycheck throughout the year. Over a third said they had less than $100 in their savings accounts.
What’s driving many people back to the grind isn’t ambition. It’s survival. No wonder we can’t let go of the hustle. We simply don’t have the choice.
I was born in the early ’80s to a lower-middle-class family in a small industrial town in the east of India. It was India before the free market. Coca-Cola had been thrown out of the country, and color TVs were as exotic as flying saucers.
My parents had survived extreme poverty before joining working-class occupations. I learned early in life that ambition wasn’t just a personal trait; my family’s salvation depended on it. Kids of our generation were raised to be devotees of upward mobility, usually by pursuing an engineering or medical degree. But I wanted to become a writer, which was seen as a recipe for starvation. My father was scared that I was heading for a hard life like he’d had, and for a couple of years we barely talked.
But when I aced my high-school exams, my parents had a change of heart and decided to send me to India’s most prestigious college to study English literature. They broke their backs so I could become the first person in my family to leave home and set foot in mythical New Delhi.
This was 2001 — exactly a decade into the liberalization of the Indian economy. Optimism was in the air. Malls and mobile phones were springing up everywhere, and Coke had come back. Ambition had leapt out of family conversations and turned into a national mission. Obscure terms like “GDP growth” were suddenly common as the country embraced upward mobility, encouraging the government to go into the next elections under the slogan “India Shining.” (It lost the elections, but that’s a different story.)
My ambition had helped me outrun the script I’d inherited, but at a hellish price.
My college was the very cradle of ambition. My classmates were the children of ministers and bureaucrats — people who had made it. I couldn’t relate to their exuberance and began hating everything about myself: my small-town accent, my unsculpted body, my unfashionable clothes, my ignorance of genteel etiquette. What started as culture shock metastasized into depression (though I didn’t have a name for it at the time). I felt lonely and lost in a world that had no patience for moping, but I learned to mask my feelings and blend in. I maintained a sparkling academic record while throwing myself into college clubs and societies. Few people had any clue that I was also routinely self-harming.
For a few years after earning my master’s degree, I took whatever job paid decently so I could send money home. It was only after my family was financially stable that I joined the profession where my heart lay: journalism. I toiled hard and progressed rapidly to senior roles. I traveled the world and told important stories while pulling 16-hour days in the name of passion, expertly covering up the torment within that never left me.
And then one day, I snapped. Burnout and depression squeezed me like a ketchup sachet. I locked myself in a dark room, drowning in a cesspit of self-loathing and sheer fatigue. It took a brush with suicidality for me to finally seek clinical care. My ambition had helped me outrun the script I’d inherited, but at a hellish price.
I don’t blame ambition for all my troubles. As a cishet, upper-caste, English-speaking man with an elite education, I have been able to follow my ambition thanks to my enormous privilege. But I’ve also seen how allowing ambition to take over your life can mess with your sense of who you really are.
Take that midnight panic-attack broadcast. As a mental-health writer, I’m critical of predatory social-media platforms. But as a creator, I share my deeply personal struggles on these platforms because it has become my selling point. I often ask myself: Do I (over)share because I want to break taboos, or because it feeds my need for validation and helps me make a living? Is turning my illness into material for my work therapeutic? Or does it deliver me into the arms of the same toxic productivity culture that I rail against in my writing?
The tension frequently pushes me into a tortured place. It doesn’t help that I’m always wary of a relapse of my hypomania, a condition characterized by abnormal energy with an exaggerated sense of self-confidence and creative ambition, often followed by exhaustion, overwhelm, and depression. It has become an untenable cycle that leaves me fantasizing about permanently breaking up with ambition.
There’s plenty of research suggesting ambition can take a destructive turn. Chasing extrinsic goals, such as power and money, is a risk factor for depression. Unregulated ambition that can be satiated only by constant external validation is also sometimes associated with narcissistic personality disorder.
My therapist assures me I don’t fit that pathology (yet), but I’ve learned to be mindful of how ambition can stem from deep inner wounds. Gabor Maté, an expert on addiction and trauma, says people who run themselves ragged in their professional lives are often acting out a childhood message that they’re not good enough just as they are. They grow up needing to constantly prove they’re worthy of love and attention.
Maté’s theory has detractors. But other research has found that early-childhood adversity can dictate career choices, especially for people in “helping professions,” including healthcare, social work, and criminal justice. Some who venture into these careers are motivated by a desire to rescue others from the pain they themselves endured, even if it means putting themselves in harm’s way. In his career construction theory, which offers a framework to explain why we choose the work we do, the psychologist Mark L. Savickas offers a striking insight: People seek to actively master what they passively suffer.
There’s also research linking ambition and “relative deprivation,” the feeling that you’ve been treated unjustly compared with others, causing frustration, anger, and resentment. If you perceive yourself as overqualified for your job, you could be more vulnerable to relative deprivation, which could drive you to behave counterproductively and unethically at work. And the more ambitious you are, the greater your chance of falling into this negative loop.
Who in today’s world can afford “inner growth” that warms the heart but leaves the kitchen cold?
At the peak of the Great Resignation, I came across a guide to being ambitious without sacrificing your mental health. One of its key prescriptions was developing a growth mindset, or sidestepping external markers of success to find inner, personal growth. You could, for instance, learn a skill for the sake of it rather than for career gains. “Have you ever lost interest in a beloved hobby after turning it into a side hustle?” the guide asked, adding, “If psychological satisfaction is your goal, you may be better off without the extra cash.”
I want to write about mental health because I’m passionate about it. But I’ve come to depend on it for my livelihood, and that makes the work feel tainted. No wonder I’ve found my motivation sagging.
Except who in today’s world can afford “inner growth” that warms the heart but leaves the kitchen cold? If you’re one of the tens of thousands of people who’ve recently been laid off, you aren’t hustling to get ahead — you’re hustling to find work that will keep the lights on.
Last year, my wife and I made a decision. After decades of living in several of India’s megalopolises, we moved to a small mountain town in the south of the country. I once scoffed at the idea of living close to nature as a first-world luxury, even though I experienced how urban pollution and noise can aggravate mental illness. But as parents to a 6-year-old, we decided to try a quieter, healthier lifestyle, even if it meant living far from regular employment opportunities, dipping into our savings, and paring down our expenses.
In the mountains, there’s no dust and noise. The internet is fickle, but for the first time in years I feel connected with my neighbors. My relationship with ambition is healing: I still go on Instagram and tell my story, but I’ve discovered that filming myself while looking out at the hills is far less likely to trigger a panic attack.
Tanmoy Goswami is a user-survivor and creator of Sanity, an independent, reader-funded mental-health-storytelling platform. He is a past fellow of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford.
