Pragmatic ambitions: goal-setting sanity

Ambition involves desires for future circumstances that you deem worth pursuing and dreaming about. Desires can be mimetic, influenced by the people in your sphere of contact. Luke Burgis explains this concept extensively in his book, Mimetic Desires. Social media culture may have exacerbated the influence of mimetic desires on your life. Exposure to the desires of many individuals molds your own desires as a consequence of that exposure.

Your (mimetic) desires are no more constrained within the small(er) confines of your local community and the people you surround yourself with in the physical world. You can see past that and within the lives of people in different corners of the globe. This can be a gift because you can expand the horizon of possibilities and perspectives you can acknowledge. It can also be a scourge if you do not behave with enough discipline to keep your mimetic desires and envy mechanisms under control since the pool of options for your own desires can become very large. More choices can increase the quality of life, and it can also create analysis paralysis and overwhelm, where choosing a direction feels almost impossible.

Ambition is the desire to achieve a specific objective at some point in the future. Ambition can be vague and imprecise or focused and detailed. In the Western world, describing someone as "ambitious" is generally viewed as a positive attribute because it implies an intrinsic motivation to pursue and achieve objectives, without being demoralized by possible failures along the way. In such context, ambition is nothing without resilience, or the capacity to push through obstacles “along the way” to achieve the end state you desire. The myth of the hero who raises to a higher self by overcoming obstacles is one that is celebrated widely in Western-society popular discourses.