The Psychology of your 20s - 459. I'm so tired of being ambitious

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

Ambition feels like my entire personality and I'm trying to fix that. Who are we beyond our ambition? In a world that only cares about success, output and productivity, what do we feel like we'll lose when we slow down? Watch on Netflix: HERE In this episode I explore:  The psychology of highly ambitious people The lies that ambition tells us  How ambition steals your joy  How to value yourself beyond your output  What matters more than ambition The way to slow ambition and why it builds more  If you can relate, this is the episode for you!  Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast Subscribe on Substack: @thepsychologyofyour20s For business: [e-mail]  The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. There's no shortcut for saving time, but saving money is simple. Just combine your car and home insurance with Bel Air Direct and save. Get a quote at bellair direct.com. Hello, everybody. I'm Gemma Spike, and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s,

and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. Thank you for joining me today. I have more of a chatty episode for you than we usually do. I kind of just wanted to share chat, muse over something I've been psychoanalyzing a lot in myself recently, just to see if any of you relate and see if any of you feel the same way. And that is my relationship with ambition. and how that is changing as I enter my late 20s, as long as I can remember. And as long as I have been, I guess, a person with a personality and a memory, I have been an ambitious person. And what I mean by ambitious is that I think I've been somebody who wanted lots from life and who was really okay with the hard work that it might take to get there. And even when I was a kid, you know, I don't think people,

would have used the word ambitious, but they certainly used words like that were pretty similar. You know, I think people would have described me as very stubborn and enthusiastic and maybe a perfectionist and goal-driven. I think even to this day, it's how my friends would describe me. I'm pretty sure everybody I've ever dated would say that I am ambitious for better or for worse. And I certainly know that it's something that my parents feel particularly proud of, that they've kind of, you know, cultivated in me since I was a kid. I think ambition alongside a good dose of luck has definitely gotten me a lot in my life so far. You know, I've written a book and it's a podcast that you are literally listening to is on Netflix and, you know, I'm not going to go on and on about,

oh, my God, everything that I've achieved and, oh, all these things, because that feels very arrogant. But I do think that I've taken for granted or as a given that if I want something in life, I really don't find it that difficult to work hard for it and to be a little bit delusional about my ability to get it. What I've come to realize, though, is the cost of that trait and how the only thing that ambition really gives you after a while is just more ambition and a greater fear of inadequacy or a greater fear that you are not living up to your own expectations. and I think it creates this void that just at some stage cannot be filled by any more accomplishments. And it also comes with the cost that is more than just work. You know, your

relationship suffer, your sense of personality kind of disappears. You feel very guilty about not being productive. And I think if we're being honest, it kind of just cannibalizes all other aspects of your life and all other aspects of who you are until it is the only thing that you are. I think it's very hard and it gets very hard to know who you are beyond your ambition or beyond your productivity, the more you lean into it and the more that you kind of see it is the greatest thing that you have to offer the world or yourself. So I want to talk about it today. I want to talk about how I've come to the realization that my ambition might not be the friend that I thought it was, how we can discover who we are within.

out our ambition and just how we get wrapped up in this accomplishment complex to begin with. And I don't know, yeah, how are we going to get out of it together, you and I? So I'm very excited for this episode. It's a personal one. I hope you enjoy it. Without further ado, let's get into the complicated psychology of ambition. So I want to begin with kind of talking about how my own relationship with ambitial. has developed over time from when I was a child to a teenager to now being an adult because I do

think that it's a familiar and fairly relatable story, particularly if you yourself were a high achiever as a kid or you are the eldest child, the eldest daughter in your family or you came from a particular kind of family where there was a real message of accomplishment. something to know about ambition and how it's spoken about specifically in psychology is that ambition is seen as a personality trait that is distinctly human. Other mammals and other animals, like they may want power, they may want control or leadership or resources, but no other creature wants the kind of success that humans seem to want, which is more than just resources and more than just being seen a certain way

by others. It's more than reputational concerns. It's really a sense of achievement and it's a sense of personal pride in something. And I think ambition links back to our human search for meaning and our desire to feel important and like we matter. And I just don't think that that's something that other animals seem to be preoccupied by. Particularly, I think with ambition, there is this sense that, you know, if I achieve this thing and I get this and I make this, and I make something of myself and I make something that I'm proud of, then I will be important and I will matter and my life will have some purpose that others can recognize and therefore it will feel more valid. So it gets very philosophical very quickly. Ambition in psychology as well is also different to

aspiration. And I really think that this is important to know because aspiration on its own is and wanting something bigger than yourself or wanting a specific goal or to realize a dream that is often quite healthy. And it's a singular kind of thing. And it's just for you and provide structure and purpose. Ambition is this pervasive trait or way of being or seeing the world that literally has no end. There is no final goal. There is no final moment of satisfaction. The task of ambition is never accomplished. And I think the prize is always out of reach. and that is what makes it so kind of mentally difficult at times. In some cultures, I think ambition is very synonymous as well with greed. And it gets a bad reputation. It's somewhat seen as a vice.

It's seen as an evil. And I really think the older I've gotten, the more I get that. Ambition can really turn people into someone that they're not. It can cause us to really disregard others. I feel like I've seen it, you've seen it. And there is no doubt that it brings out some ugly sides of ourselves. But I think the personal cost is also really great. Feeding your ambition, when you've done it for long enough, becomes your sole task in many ways. Whatever avenue you can feed your ambition through, you will do so. And the way that it's spoken about is that you don't really have a choice. Like, it's something that you're, you're kind of born with. It's what we would call intrinsic. I also think it comes from how we were raised. And I also think that at times

it evolves as a bit of a coping mechanism or a survival strategy against the circumstances of when you were younger. And I see that particularly for myself. As I said, you know, I'm fairly certain historically, like, looking into my own autobiographical memory, like I've always somewhat been this way. But I also think as a kid, I was more aspirational and like driven by curiosity and a love for things. And then that kind of stopped when I got to high school and that's when I became ambitious with a capital A, rather than aspirational with a lowercase A. And the reason I became ambitious is because I believe I saw my ambition and what it could bring me as a way to compensate for some really, really deep insecurities. I really didn't belong. I really didn't feel like I had many friends. I've spoken about

this before on the podcast, but, you know, I was very lonely. I was also a pretty like, I don't like to say ugly kid, but yeah, I was a little ugly kid and I was a weird kid and I was odd and I was interested in strange things and I was overzealous because I didn't have any friends and I don't think that really helped me socially either because I just really wanted to be part of a group. And what I learned pretty early on was that, you know, if I couldn't be the most liked or the hottest or the smartest, at least I could be the person who works the hardest. And that in itself will bring its own kind of reward. In particular, it will definitely mean that one group of people specifically will like

more, which is adults. Adults will pay more attention to me if I'm ambitious and accomplished. You know, our whole schooling system and the first 18 years of our life really is centralized around a grading system and a ranking system and a system that rewards ambition and kids without actually giving them other ways to function. You know, there are prizes for the most extracurriculars that you can jam into a week and there's prizes for being a straight-A student and for being very academic and I really sunk my teeth into that as a teen. nature. Ambition was like this safe haven for me. You know, if there was nothing else I can control about how others perceive me or how I feel, I can always rely on my ambition. It's also what's going to

get me out of this situation that I don't want to be in anymore. You know, I don't, what didn't feel like I really fit in where I grew up and it could have, and it did get me to a good school far, far away. And when I did that, I kind of thought, well, this is where my life can really begin. there's also a deep and unavoidable relationship here between, I would say, ambition, praise, and self-esteem. Psychologists have a term for this. It's called contingent self-worth. And it is a type of self-esteem that is based on the approval of others, specifically for one thing or one domain that you're very good at and that feels particularly important or valuable for you. These two psychologists, and they're amazing, and I really recommend their work. Their names are Jennifer Crocker and Connie Wilf.

They're from the University of Michigan. They developed this kind of model in the early 2000s that argues that we all have certain domains where we tend to stake our self-esteem. For some people, that might be their appearance. They really stake how they feel about themselves on how they look. For others, it's romantic approval or being liked. For others, it's competition, it's sports, and for some people, it's just pure ambition. When something goes well in that domain, so you do really well at a sporting event, you get

complimenting on your looks, you get a boyfriend, our self-esteem gets a boost. The more we feel good or rewarded for that specific thing, the more we chase it as a viable way to feel better about ourselves because of the positive reinforcement we are receiving. So if ambition becomes the place where you've decided your worth lives, the abundance of ambition becomes how you feel good about ourselves and the abundance of accomplishment also becomes the way we feel good about ourselves. And our self-esteem becomes very narrow and it becomes very singularly dependent on this one part of who we are and that leaves us very vulnerable. You can see how easily that relationship gets reinforced when you're young. If you study really hard

and you get an A, you get all this praise from your teachers. Your parents are proud of you. Maybe your name goes on like an honor board. Maybe the other kids who don't particularly notice you socially, sometimes, like suddenly know you as the smart one, the successful one, they ask you for help. Achievement gives you something extremely psychologically powerful and addictive, which is a reliable route to positive attention. I think unlike popularity or unlike attractiveness or even unlike whether somebody wants to be your friend, being ambitious, particularly when you are young, as I said, feels controllable because there are rules and often there is a rubric and there is a hierarchy and there is, you know when

you're doing well versus when you're not. And that means that it becomes a game that we can play very, very well and very, very easily with enough practice. So this. This is basically the pathway in how we become dependent or addicted to ambition because it's giving us a social and a kind of self-approval that we cannot get elsewhere and that we maybe have never known. Now, there is, of course, a healthy level of ambition. I just don't think I've ever been able to find it because because of what ambition represents for me psychologically and because of what it has represented for me in the past

socially, it just became and is still so intertwined with all these other meaningful things and important things that it cannot be isolated away from everything else. So what exactly has changed for me in recent years? Because as grateful as I am to what my ambition has given me, I, like many others, have become very disillusioned. That's what this whole episode is about. And I do think that at some stage, we reach a tipping point. And what that tipping point is is going to be different for everyone. But eventually you get there. So we're going to talk about this. We're going to talk about what's kind of driven me to question my ambition and maybe want to break from it in just a second. So stay with us.

There's no shortcut for saving time, but saving money is simple. Just combine your car and home insurance with Bel Air Direct and save. Get a quote at bellair direct.com. So I think the question for the second half of this episode is when does ambition start to become a curse after so many years of it kind of being seen as an ally? The tipping point for a lot people, it's just burnout. Ambition is very all-consuming. And let's be real, it really doesn't care about if you're balanced. It really doesn't care about if you're fulfilled or if you have friends or if you have time for your family. Everything else in your life is demoted and it's seen as unimportant. Ambition really only operates on one metric and one dimension, which is success and recognition

and pride and as much of those things as we can get. The thing is that those emotional states and those feelings have a very short psychological shelf life. What I mean by that is that a feeling of pride and a feeling of like, okay, I'm doing okay here and I feel happy and I feel like I've really done something good, that can only last anywhere from a few weeks to a few hours because our ambition is will inevitably be hungry again. It will inevitably want more. For example, you know, and I've seen this in my own life, a big thing that I've been loving recently is sub-sacac. and writing on substack. And for a while, I kind of just did it with no expectations. And I just kind of did it because I really loved it. And I felt like it was this very serene and cozy corner of the internet. And it's still very much it is, if I'm being honest. But then I started to get subscribers and I started to get followers. And that was it. That was it.

That was like, that's all. You know, my ambitious mind was kind of like, took that, saw that and was like, okay, well, this is our terrain now. We're going to take over from here. And it suddenly made me very obsessive. And it meant that it wasn't fun anymore. And I reached like 400,000 subscribers a couple of weeks back. And that's an insane number of people. And it was this amazing feeling for a second of like, wow, I've worked really hard at this. I feel really connected to this community. I feel a sense of accomplishment. That lasted literally, I would say, 48 hours before I was like preoccupied with the next milestone and preoccupied with this and that, this is the curse of ambition. Like, that's not fun. It is not fun to feel that way. But ambition tells you that it doesn't need to be fun. The process

doesn't need to be fun because the outcomes it produces will be worth it. And it doesn't tell you the kind of fine print, which is that the outcome is only ever going to feel good for a second compared to the time you spent to get that outcome. You may have have heard of another psychology term for this, pretty well known, the hedonic treadmill. And the hedonic treadmill or hedonic adaptation, as it's also known, is our tendency and our ability to adapt to changes in our circumstances, particularly improvements. The thing that once seemed extraordinary and amazing and life-changing eventually becomes very normal. And our expectations kind of rise alongside that. There has been so much research on ambition that is

found that people who are highly ambitious, achieving a goal for them does still produce positive emotions, but those emotional benefits and positive emotions are not necessarily as permanent as they are for others, especially if you are somebody who is pursuing achievement and pursuing success from a place of longing or lacking or emptiness. They only serve one psychological purpose, which is to not make you feel bad about yourself. I think I guess what I just realized was that none of this was making me happy anymore, but also I do all this stuff, I work so hard, I sacrifice, and then what? A lot of the time, our ambition actually doesn't even have a payout anyways. And I was actually talking to a listener about this the other day who wrote in. And she was

talking about this in the context of looking for work, and she's just graduating uni, and she's looking for a a bad job. And what she basically said was that she spent her whole life being straight-a-student, amazing student, convinced that working hard, giving up weekends, doing everything extra was a secret to a stable, happy life. And now she's looking for a job and she can't get one. And she doesn't get any callbacks and she doesn't get any bites. And she's like, I've done everything right. I'm so ambitious. And the ambition that promised so much has really just left me feeling awfully disappointed. And what she essentially was realizing was like, I could have spent all that time actually enjoying myself. And I didn't because I was sold this kind of lie. There was this weird

sense where we feel like we need to work hard to secure a good future so that in 25, 30 years, we won't have to worry about money and we can enjoy ourselves and that is a very important thing. But we could have been enjoying ourselves the whole time rather than just at the end if we'd had a gentle a form of ambition. This relates to something I said just before. What does ambition really give us other than simply more ambition? You know, there's a strange metaphor. There's probably like a riddle in this, really, which is, I don't know, what could the riddle be? Like, what's something that gets hungry or the more you feed it? That is ambition. That is our sense of accomplishment. The more you give it, the more at once. There is a bottomless pit. For me, though, I personally think my turning point

was when I realized ambition didn't actually make me a happy or well-rounded person. Specifically, what was the trigger for me was when I was on vacation when I was on holiday. And I was in the south of France last week with a big group of my friends and these are like my best friends. And we've all chipped in for this beautiful Airbnb and we're cooking fresh fish and we're going to the beach and we're having wine and we're eating, we're playing games. And I could genuinely not relax. I could not be in the present moment if I had not done at least a couple hours of work that day.

Like I couldn't do it. And on one of the days, everyone went on this ferry to this island and I stayed home and I worked and I didn't need to. Like I could have taken my meeting and go on and join them later. But it was this compulsion. Like it was a compulsion. I was like, I have to earn my enjoyment and I haven't done enough work to relax yet. I just think that is like so many other forms of disordered thinking, you know, believing that we have to earn calories or earn certain foods, believing that we have to earn

rest through exercise, believing that we have to earn love. It's so similar. It is believing that I need to earn permission from my ambition to actually enjoy my life. And I was just kind of like How horrible is that? And you know what? Everything that I did that day, like it could have waited. None of it was urgent. Most of it was also pretty unimportant. All of it was.

But I just felt I felt like I needed to do it so that I could relax and not feel guilty. And if I just relaxed, I would have felt lazy and I wouldn't have been able to enjoy myself. So to kind of summarize this feeling, I think it's really that my ambition promises me my dream. life whilst my real life kind of passes me by. And that is why I have a problem with it. And this is the curse of ambition. It becomes such a core part of your identity, my identity, our identity, that you have to keep living it out and serving it even when it no longer serves you because it feels like it is your friend. And I read this really great article from the sub-sec is star-burned and it's titled, Who Am I Without My Ambition? And the author, she says,

something which I think really resonates, which is that ambition is very spiky and it convinces you that you cannot live without it. And in that way, it's like a toxic relationship. It really is. It's amazing when it's really good, but the good doesn't last very long. And then it's awful the rest of the time. But we're convinced that we need it. And obviously I'm not trying to compare the two, but I think that it's, it's an important metaphor to understand your relationship with ambition differently rather than just as a good thing. So if you've reached, a similar point to me of questioning who am I beyond my ambition, who am I beyond somebody that's able to work hard, what do we do with this? How do we form a healthier relationship with it when

it's kind of all we've ever known? I think the most critical thing that we can do for ourselves is to see who we are and how much we have to offer as more than just our productivity and our work ethic. We are kind of valuing ourselves as we would a machine. But we are a person, We are a living, breathing creature who brings so much more value than just input and output. And you cannot have a healthier relationship with ambition if you do not acknowledge that. One of the concepts I find really useful here is called self-complexity. This is a concept I learned from the researcher, Patricia Linville from Duke University. And she basically describes how we have to be able to acknowledge the different dimensions that make up our sense of self.

and you cannot be happy if you don't hold all those versions as equally important and equally deserving of respect. So you might be a lawyer, you might be a straight-day student, you might be a designer or a business owner, but you are also a friend and a sibling and a partner, and you are also somebody who was funny and curious and creative and adventurous and you're really good at remembering birthdays and you're obsessed with a particular movie and you are somebody who makes others feel very, very comfortable, just because those parts of you have less productive value, like, that doesn't mean that they are meaningless. Like, they are kind of the whole point. And research on self-complexity by that same researcher really shows that there are psychological benefits to being able to respect

the parts of you that may not necessarily be traditionally useful, but make you feel like yourself. because when one area of your life takes a hit, and it will, it doesn't necessarily have to threaten our entire sense of who we are. So if your whole identity is, I am somebody who is successful, I am somebody who is ambitious, a professional failure is not just a professional failure, it is a full-blown identity crisis because there is nothing else to rest your identity on. But if you are successful but also a good friend and kind and generous and animals love you, like a professional issue, like you can step out of that role. So I think if you want to know who you are without your ambition, list it out, you know, hi, my name is Gemma and I'm, I'm ambitious and I'm a hard

worker. But here is like something more interesting about me, which is that I host really great dinner parties. And I am, I've read 20 books this year and I always call my long distance best friends. I'm very good at that. And if no one noticed, I would still be interested in psychology and I'd still be interested in research and I would still be interested in the world and I think I would still be a good person. And those are all things that I am without my ambition. I also believe, secondly to this, that we have to stop thinking about ambition as this thing that will expire or go off if we don't use all of it right now. That is a frame of mind that I find myself in all the time. If I don't keep up with my ambition and if I don't constantly stretch it and test it,

like I'm going to forget how to be ambitious. And so when I finally eventually stumble on something I really want to be ambitious about, I'm not going to be able to do it. I won't be able to make it work. You know, what if I suddenly become lazy? Is that a possibility? That's like the big fear with giving up our ambition. This is such a deep cognitive fallacy.

And it's the same fallacy that keeps us hooked or dependent on so many things. because it treats ambition as this physical resource rather than as this intrinsic part of who you are. You know, as we know from the literature that we've already covered, ambition is part of our personality. We are often very much born with it, with a percentage of it. It's just, it's inbuilt to your temperament. And the intrinsic nature here is, I think, both the curse and part of the solution, because you cannot unlearn something completely that is part of who you are, the same way that you

cannot unlearn other parts of who you are, like your kindness or your sensitivity or your sense of justice. These things don't go bad. They don't expire from lack of use. They just can and will sit below the surface for a little while until you need them and then you can call on them. And what we're also forgetting is that when we do need them for something really, really important, and we do really want to call on our ambition as this hidden well of reserves we have, we'll probably have more motivation and most importantly more time to actually execute our vision because we're not kind of tied up and having all these other things and activities that our ambition required us to do in order to feed it and keep it satiated.

You know, this idea that we may forget our ambition is basically just catastrophizing. It's all or nothing thinking that is very, very relevant and severe in our 20s. In our 20s, I'll be the first to admit, like, I don't know who I am yet. I'm sure you don't really know who you are. And so we imagine that there are really only some very binary versions of us. There's only two possible versions of ourselves. Either I am the relentlessly ambitious person who is constantly achieving, or I am the lazy person who is completely given up.

There is no middle ground. That's what our brain tells us. And that's crazy. No one is ever just one thing. We are so much more nuanced than that. And I think just like nature, we have our seasons. We have our seasons where we work really hard and we blossom and we have a lot of harvest or output. You equally require the winters of life and you require seasons of rest and hibernation that allow for the prosperous seasons.

Everything has to occur in this balance. And by trying to push ambition constantly, you disrupt the natural balance of being. I think the final solution for the ambition problem, crucially, is also just to be more clear about why you want something to begin with and what you would be giving up by pursuing that thing right now. Essentially, it's about interrogating if you are feeding the ambition beast because the ambition beast is hungry or you are actually feeding yourself and your soul. Specific questions to ask yourself, would you still want this thing if no one else was around? is getting this thing actually going to make you happy?

Is the desire to achieve this sitting in for some other fundamental need? Like the need to feel like you matter or the need to feel like you're important. Again, coming back to this thing, is this actually going to make me happy? You only have so much time. That's part of the fear around giving up ambition. But you need to decide whether you're going to spend that ambition on small vanity projects or little things or you're going to save it. you're going to store it up for something really, really, really special to use all your

ambition on it. It's going to feel really purposeful rather than just just something to kind of keep the demons away. I think as ambitious people, we need to become much better at thinking about opportunity cost. Every kind of yes to one version of your life is inevitably a no to another. So if you decide, I don't know, if you decide you want to build the biggest company in the world or in your industry, and you want to become the best researcher in your field or at your university and you want to work every weekend for the next 10 years, maybe that is genuinely worth it to you and you have found what you really care about. But you should at least acknowledge what you are exchanging for it, which is perhaps more meaningful, slower experiences

that are worth a lot more. Ambition has this tendency to make a lot of, its rewards extremely visible and its costs extremely invisible. It's very easy to be like, this person is successful because they make all this money and they have this award and they have this number of followers. It is much harder to point to the afternoon that they missed with their friends that did not happen. It's much harder to point to the cost to their mental health of constantly thinking, am I doing enough? Am I reaching my potential? I should be doing more. I could always be doing more, am I a failure? Like, we don't see that cost.

And it's not a nice feeling at all to never be happy with what you have. And I think it's a reality that endless ambition creates, which is dissatisfaction at times. You know, and I think it's worth questioning, why do I even need to be the best? Why do I even need these accomplishments or things if the only thing it gets me is, again, a deeper sense that I'm not doing enough and just a bar that keeps being raised? I never stopped to examine that is happiness or satisfaction ever even on the on the on the cards. I guess I don't really know. I don't really know.

I just know that part of that that there is a part of me that is hopefully trying to work on being better with my ambition. And I definitely don't want to be 30 or 40 and still thinking this way. And I don't want to be 30 or 40 and still bringing my laptop on every holiday so that I can earn my time off. And I don't want to be 30 or 40 and feeling like if I don't achieve X, in this amount of time it is all over. I don't know. Maybe that's just something that time kind of helps with,

but it's something I'm struggling with and something that I know a lot of you are and hopefully just being able to relate to this and us being able to tear apart the narrative and the myths that ambition sells us is useful and helpful because it's definitely been helpful to me. So I think that's all I have for today. I think that's, I feel better.

That's all my thoughts. summarized and wrapped up and delivered to you in this neat tiny episode. So I hope that you can relate to this episode in some way. It's made you feel better. If you have, you know, made it this far. Thank you for listening. Feel free to leave a little comment down below if you're listening on Spotify. Make sure that you leave a five-star review or share this episode with a friend.

If you think that it might help them as well, fellow former high achievers, eldest daughters, straight-A students, I feel like we can all unite around this topic. There's heaps more, as I said, I'm really enjoying substack, and it's actually the thing I'm trying to focus on just enjoying for the sake of it more. So if you want to join me over there, there'll be a link in the description alongside our Instagram, where you can watch this episode and many others just like it on Netflix. There's just always, there's always some goodies down there. But again, thank you for listening.

Until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will talk very, very soon. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.