On Not Ambition
A perspective on the rat race
7/19/2025
Ambition. There’s an ugly word. Comes from the Latin ambitio, meaning—no surprise—“going around” (round and round in circles), desperately begging for votes, overpromising the sky and other lies. Essentially, a politician’s daily bowel movement. Now ask yourself: do you really want your life’s theme song to echo the gastrointestinal routine of a Roman senator, circling pathetically, shaking sweaty hands and making false promises about aqueducts using a metal for plumbing that we now know is a toxin? Precisely.
Ambition, you see, is overrated—like sobriety at a North Calcutta wedding, or traffic laws in the City of Joy.
Consider instead the tremendous advantages of abject mediocrity like the sort I enjoy—well below the standards of the least desirable by UN standards, like the lack of fecal contamination in Calcutta water—the Zen-like bliss of zero ambition—floating icebergs of commoners’ fecal logs in potable water is commonplace. First off, no ulcers. Ambition is a stomach-churning, sphincter-puckering state of perpetual indigestion: endlessly striving to impress people you wouldn’t trust to microwave your leftover fish curry. When you gracefully decline to hustle, your insides thank you. They emit sighs of relief. Your colon, normally clenched tighter than what’s required to juice a ripe mango, finally relaxes, becoming holybaba-level serene.
“Work,” the ambitious foreign-return moron yammers, “builds character.” But then again, so does diarrhea—and with a lot less stress. And fewer meetings. Ever sat through a performance review? Hell, I’d rather sit through a colonoscopy performed by an enthusiastic first-year Calcutta intern with unsterilized, shaky hands and a video tutorial open on YouTube. Because ambition demands you constantly improve, evolve, grow like an unkillable freaky fungus, multiplying emails and tasks faster than cholera through erstwhile nineteenth-century Calcutta. On the other hand, laziness—the Bengali sort—graciously offers you the profound insight that improvement is a scam. Progress, you see, is simply another way Western capitalism tricks you into working harder for futile feces you don’t even need—never even heard about—like artisanal kombucha or a subscription-based salty salad.
“But without ambition, how do we achieve greatness?” says the sweating zealot, chugging overpriced espresso shots extracted from beans passed through the derriere of a small Indonesian mammal. Look, greatness itself is an irredeemably arbitrary crock of nonsense. Alexander the Great died at 32, probably of ambition-induced liver failure or some other equally embarrassing illness he wouldn’t put on his LinkedIn. And anyway, he conquered half the world and still couldn’t find happiness, mostly because happiness doesn’t live in Afghanistan or Persia. Happiness lives exactly three inches left of your sofa cushion, right behind the remote and slightly above that dried-up samosa you lost last Wednesday. Or ask the ants—they don’t need it, or hierarchy, or any of the overrated, highly prized bloatware we fill our libraries with.
Imagine instead an ambition-free life: you wake up gloriously late, no stupid alarm clock sounding like a moyna trapped in a DC ceiling fan. Breakfast is lunch, lunch is tea, and dinner is whatever Zomato delivers—because cooking is for people who have “goals” and use words like “keto” and “macros,” not for you, the enlightened lotus-eater, the king of existential slack. You sit contemplating not your career trajectory but whether the green chili or the red chili goes better with your evening fish cutlet. These are noble thoughts that Bengal has used to lead India—worthier than any damn TED talk or productivity guru’s Instagram reel.
History backs me up, you know. Diogenes—ancient Greece’s most celebrated, unkempt, lazy hobo—lived comfortably in a barrel, taking a leak or dump where he stood, mocking Plato’s uptight students by hand-fornicating openly and enjoying every sunny moment of utter uselessness. Modernity, sadly, replaced Diogenes with motivational speakers who sell anxiety disguised as ambition, and self-loathing dressed as purpose-driven “content creation.” Give me the barrel any day; barrels don’t have deadlines, barrels don’t have KPIs, and barrels certainly never ask, “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
Here in Calcutta, the unambitious inherit the earth—or at least a nice spot near the tea stall under a metro bridge, philosophizing profoundly about life’s utter withering meaninglessness, punctuated only by passionate debates about Indian sportsmen of yore—when other countries were still damp dumps—and bowel movements, preferably at the same time and in the same sentence. Meanwhile, the ambitious spend their days in a simultaneous and parallel universe in the same city, sweating in a metro compartment speeding on the bridge above, clawing upward, rushing toward an irreversible coronary bypass, preparing to go to the office to scream at subordinates and create PowerPoints about nothing.
So do yourself a feeble favor: embrace the dignity of going nowhere, the philosophical sophistication of achieving precisely nothing at all. This way lies wisdom, freedom, and excellent bowel health. You won’t win any awards or get a plaque naming a bridge after you. But bridges collapse—especially in India—awards gather dust, and ambition is nothing but heartburn with an ill-fitting suit that’s not even your style. You, my dear unambitious friend, will lounge eternally in serene indifference, knowing you have mastered life’s greatest truth—semitruth at least: nothing matters, and that is perfectly fine.