I think I owned this cassette in the mid-80s. RIP Jeff Beck. He was one of the best.
Ambition gets a bad rap. The word is often paired with someone working 120 hours a week to climb the corporate ladder or stabbing others in the back to get ahead. Ambition is framed as something a singular figure does, clawing and scratching, consequences be damned to achieve a selfish personal goal. Sure, that exists, and ambition isn’t a great character trait when the person with ambition lacks empathy or has no moral compass.
Ambitious people who are also narcissistic sociopaths aren’t some lone wolf acting alone. They need other people to help them get to the top. They might use people, and see relationships as only transactional, and not symbiotic. But they do have a lot of support from other people that help them. Those other people are likely ambitious themselves, using the narcissistic sociopath and others to get ahead. Everyone is hustling to get ahead, and many probably know, or assume they are being used. But they don’t care as long as they get theirs.
But that isn’t the only flavor of ambition. We should all be ambitious to make the world better and not be shy about it.
I confess I was ambitious. No apologies.
The reason I started writing in this space was ambition. I suffer under no illusion that writing a degrowth blog on Substack is going to bring me fame and fortune.
It has brought me what I sought. My ambition was to help grow the global degrowth community because I knew a good idea when I saw one, and I thought not enough people knew the possibility of a post-growth world.
There was urgency behind that ambition.
I didn’t really have concrete goals beyond writing this blog for a year (accomplished that), getting to 1,000 subscribers (accomplished that), and growing the degrowth community (accomplished that).
Be more ambitious.
I’m asking you to be more ambitious about how to make this world a better place. Share that ambition with other likeminded individuals who will be excited to see what you are doing and who can help you. And help them.
That was the whole point of building this community, which I hope extends beyond this little blog. I hope that people have made connections here, and met people here that will help spread the word about this idea, that degrowth is the answer.
If you have ambitions you want to share here feel free to do so, or do so in other places if they are more appropriate. Please share your ambitions with the people who can help you. An ambition kept to oneself is a great journey that will never be taken.
So if you have an ambition that might make things better, please pursue it, or share it with us here, or with others who may help.
Together is the only way out of this.
What next?
I’ve accomplished the modest ambitions I had for this blog. But I feel we shouldn’t stop there. Please let me know what you see as viable and constructive ambitions for this community and this space. Please share your ambitions for helping the world move toward a post-growth future where we live within our planetary boundaries.
There is another ambition that was itching inside of me that I’ve started. I’ll be sharing it soon. I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts on that.
Stay tuned.
Congratulations on what you've created Matt - very worthwhile. Regarding suggestions for further ambitions, here's one from a bottom up perspective. Regardless of what one believes about the likelihood of governments implementing adequate top down solutions to our ecological overshoot and inequality challenges, a bottom up approach makes sense. If governments DO put adequate policies is place, then they will support the bottom up approaches already in place and make them easier. If governments DO NOT put adequate policies in place, then at least some communities might be in a position to manage better than they otherwise would as the existential risks that we face unfold ever faster. The bottom up approach that a small group of us here is NZ is pursuing is to facilitate and support the development of community resilient projects. We approach resilience as not simply "bouncing back" (since "back" is the problem), but as working toward sustainably ensuring that everyone's universal basic needs are met, regardless of what adverse events unfold. We take a degrowth approach to ensuring basic needs (both material and non-material) - keep it simple, minimize energy and material use, involve everyone, etc. We emphasize the importance of working as a community rather than only preparing at the family level (both are important). So the suggestion for a new ambition is to help create millions of such projects - as a method of bringing people together around a common cause (decreases polarization), striving for living sustainably (which is only possible with degrowth), reducing inequality (by ensuring everyone's basic needs are met), providing an example to other communities of what is possible (by creating living examples, not just scenarios), and demonstrating to politicians what people are willing to do to ensure a planet safe for future generations (by creating large numbers of such projects). Of course, this doesn't mean abandoning a top down approach - both approaches complement each other. But some folks will naturally gravitate toward one or the other. Best wishes jack
I dream of a world where friendship is an important foundation of our relationship with each other and nature, where quality of life supercedes quantity of life, where we can relax and thrive at the same time, and where sanity replaces the seemingly habitual violence of our current cultures. It is time to chill, take a breath and realize that we have been doing it wrong for a long time and figure out what a healthier, happier world where we live in balance with nature really looks like in practice and reality.