A Conditional Love of Ambition

Carpe diem!  Make your life extraordinary!  Live the life you’ve always imagined!  Pursue your dreams!  Go for them with all your might, all your gusto!  Reach for the stars and accomplish everything you’d ever want to!  Let nothing stop you!

Unless of course your dream involves any kind of harm to anyone at all, then what the fuck of course never do that, stupid.

You don’t hear that a lot.  Self-helpers don’t emphasize it, and politicians don’t include this in their platitudes about the American dream, but it is something we all need to remember.    Before you pursue anything in life, of course you should think about how you’ll be impacting the world.  It’s incredibly simple, and incredibly important, and so many people don’t think about it.

You are going splitsies with everyone on earth.  You, Barack Obama, a bar-back in Munich, and an 83-year-old Chinese lady all are sharing this big blue rock thing, so what you do impacts others.  Putting something out in the world that sucks, or doing it in a way that sucks–even if it’s your absolute greatest passion–is terrible.  Stop it.  Bad dog.  Rip up the dream and flush it down the toilet.

We have an unconditional love for ambition in this country, and it’s a problem.  We can love ambition but it should really be pretty God damn conditional.  If somebody says they’ll succeed “no matter what it takes,” we admire them.  Of course, “no matter what it takes,” by definition, could involve slave labor, ass-fucking the planet, or using cozy Christmas polar bears to sell kids what is essentially a drug.

And it often does include these things.  So maybe we should reconsider how our society looks at this.  Maybe we need to overhaul our priorities.  Maybe if you can make billions of dollars by destroying the world, something is wrong with our system.  And so maybe before we cannonball into our dream life, we should consider that making everybody else at the party wet is a dick move.

People complain that pro athletes are overpaid because they’re paid millions and they’re not exactly curing cancer, but there are people out there who are paid billions who are probably giving us all cancer.

Why, in a just world, should Coca-Cola be a multi-billion dollar company?  What are they really bringing to the table?  “Oh, here’s addiction, diabetes and fatties.  You’re welcome.”

Doesn’t our system suck if you can succeed providing that to the world?  Aren’t you just an asshole if you’re a part of it?

And that’s not even mentioning wall street criminals, DeBeers, Monsanto, or fucking God damn fucking die-in-a-fire Time Warner you are literally Hitler God I hate you more than everything.

“But I need to make a living.”  That’s what you’ll often hear, and on a smaller scale, it is a valid excuse a lot of the time.  It really is.  But we weirdly tend to accept it no matter what the context.

“I come from a small town where jobs are scarce.  I have no choice but to convince doctor’s to shove horrifying drugs down patients’ throats.  I have to make a living.”

“Look, I know the people that make my company’s tablet make 4 cents an hour, and have started eating the parts in an attempt at suicide, but come on.  Be reasonable.  I need to feed my children.”

“I understand some people are anti-date-rape-for-profit, but hey man, we all have a mortgage, you know what I mean?”

This is nothing new though, right?  We all know there are tons of corporations who are totally fine and moral and justified in what they do, and plenty more who would murder a school of Downs children in cold blood to see .03% increase in quarterly revenue.  You get that.  I get that.  Let’s get to the real question.

Horrible side effects are never part of the initial plan.  Nobody wakes up one morning, looks up at their ceiling, and says, “I just want to clog arteries and leave fatherless children.”   There are no dudes majoring in entrepreneurship right now daydreaming about one day bribing a congressman to close down the coalmine that employs their entire hometown.  No little kids go to career day and give speeches about how they want to sell people faulty loans to maximize profit margins.

This is all a product of growing up in America, having phrases like, “Go for you dreams!  Live the life you imagined!  Nothing’s gonna stop you!” hammered into your brain over and over and over and over.

So of course you’re bound to think, “I’m not gonna let the fuckin’ environment stop me.  Who gives a shit.  ‘The fuck is the environment gonna do?  Karen, call the environment and tell it to global warm my taint.”

People repeat those American dream phrases, forget the world around them, get tunnel vision, and that’s how we end up with Exxon, Little Debbie, and Geico commercials.  It’s all a product of oversimplifying a message.  It turns ambition into blind ambition.

And that is the difference.  Ambition is great.  Blind ambition sucks every dick on the planet.  It’s the worst.  It’s why people do unconscionable things for profits.  It’s because their head is so high up in the clouds believing in the Disney magic of their dreams that they don’t notice that their giant feet are crushing cities as they wander around.

Blind ambition allows people to justify anything to themselves.  Steve Jobs could tell himself it was totally cool that the people who actually put iPhones together would routinely try to kill themselves at their plant because well, fuck you, we have iPhones now, and look at what those have done for the world (good, I guess?).  BP asshole can tell himself it’s fine that his company destroyed an entire gulf because the world literally runs on his gas.  Donald Trump can justify that it’s cool to be a blubbering cunt, because…well I don’t know.  Just, fuck that guy.

Living in consideration of others just isn’t the national attitude.  It’s not our culture.  It’s not emphasized anywhere because it kind of flies in the face of the American dream.  There’s no fucking way this attitude is more likely to make you richer.  Shit, I don’t even know if it will make you happier.  It’s reliant entirely on you deciding to not being selfish.  It’s reliant on you examining yourself and your actions, and who would willingly do that in a world where puppy videos exist?

So here’s how I’m going to convince you to not be like this: Strap in, kids.  We’re going on a guilt trip.

Okay, so you’re not going to be a billionaire that runs a massive corporation that fucks up the world.  I’m writing this all just in case you are, because I feel like many current billionaires didn’t have this lesson growing up, but that’s totally not happening for you.

But here’s the thing: we all fuck up the rest of the world a little just by surviving.  We all eat food somebody else could eat, we all take up a spot in traffic, we all make poop that has to go somewhere.  We’re all unavoidably running our own little corporations that are slowly ruining everything.  Good going, shithead.

So you’d better fucking cut it out before you kill us all.  Here’s two things you can do to stop destroying everyone so much:

1) Try not to support cunts if you can.  I know it’s a complicated thing to decide on who is and isn’t a cunt, and I’ll leave that to you.  Maybe start with something easy like a bank, or a Walton.  The important part is that you try.  Give a shit and take action.

2) Try to see where you’re slowly ruining everything, stop where you can, and try to offset how terrible you are.
For legal purposes, I can’t tell you to stop pooping, so I won’t.  But you can at least try to see where you’re contributing negatively to things and stop.

Along with this, try to offset the space you take up and the crap you consume.   This means caring for people you meet, and people you’ll never meet.  You don’t have to feel feelings for them (phew, right?).   Just remember that they exist, and act with them in mind.  I know it’s annoying and boring, but if you don’t do this, you’re a net negative on humanity, and honestly, kinda fuck you for existing.  Also your mother will be so disappointed in you.

I know this seems harsh, but if you don’t look at it this way, you’ll probably never do anything to live less selfishly.  There’s a good chance you won’t do anything differently anyway because you’re not going to read anything here and take it seriously, but if I can just get 5% of you to live your lives a little better and with other people in mind, then I’m that much closer to breaking even, and then I can poop all I want guilt-free.  So there.