Over the summer, a close friend from grad school left me a voice note with the following question:
Do you ever wonder if we would be happier if we stopped writing?
These words had a comical record-scratch effect on my body. What? No! Of course not! My heart was racing, and I could feel my skin getting hot. My brain was having a full-on meltdown. We can only be happy if we keep writing!
“It was the sort of instant, outsized reaction that a wiser person knows merits its own investigation. I am not yet that wise, however.”
It was the sort of instant, outsized reaction that a wiser person knows merits its own investigation. I am not yet that wise, however. So instead of turning a curious and compassionate gaze on myself asking why I had a full-bodied panic attack over the idea of being happier if I stopped doing something that regularly gives me headaches and despair, I spent several months building a case for all the reasons that we should never, under any circumstances, stop doing it.
Writing is part of who we are! It’s when we are our truest selves — we can’t give up! We have to keep going!
It took me some time to recognize that I was, of course, not talking to my friend at all. I don’t think I was even talking about writing really. I was talking to myself — a deeply hidden, inner version of myself — who still believes that I need to earn my self-worth in order to be happy. Writing, however natural and essential it feels to me (and however painful and impossible it feels at times, too!), has also long been anchored to certain ambitions — goals that will prove my value to, well, everyone.
It has been a long road, one that has often left me wondering how long could I live like this, sacrificing everything in my present all for the sliver of a chance at some moment in my future? Even if I did succeed, would the cost be worth it?
“How long could I live like this, sacrificing everything in my present all for the sliver of a chance at some moment in my future? Even if I did succeed, would the cost be worth it?”
This formula doesn’t add up. The math does not math. And listening to that voice — the one that says that a good life is measured in accomplishments and accolades — doesn’t *spoiler alert* bring happiness. For me, it’s almost always guaranteed the opposite.
I’ve unfortunately had to learn this lesson the hard way more than once.
What we sacrifice to win
If you’ve ever had a job where you were encouraged to “Give 110%!” and “Go above and beyond!” then I imagine this experience will feel familiar to you.
It started with small sacrifices: turning down happy hour in order to stay late and go the extra mile at the office. Skipping the gym so I could go to a networking event. Eating a protein bar at 2pm because I worked through yet another lunch.
I just need to get this over the line. I’d tell my friends, my partner, myself. Only one more hour, one more week, one more quarter. The sacrifices became more and more consistent, until I wasn’t getting invited to happy hour anymore, and I was paying for a membership to a gym I hadn’t been inside for six months. And then the sacrifices became more pervasive, more hurtful to myself and the people I loved. I was one-track minded and totally absorbed with my ambitions — all I wanted to talk about was my project, my process, my goals, which made me a terrible friend and partner. I never asked questions, never listened. I wasn’t present, living instead for a future that was in no way promised.
“I wasn’t getting invited to happy hour anymore, and I was paying for a membership to a gym I hadn’t been inside for six months.”
Little by little, my life thinned out. This is what it takes to win, a voice deep inside me said. You do what you have to do to get to the top.
The voice wasn’t so much a cheerleader as a heckler, and this sort of motivation was powerful to me. The threat of what it would mean to fail pushed me over the finish line for a long time, but the rush of confidence that came from each achievement always faded, and I’d be left with nothing but that voice, already scheming about what I needed to do next to get it back.
Go bigger, it always seemed to say. Go harder. You can do better than that.
Every time I placed in the Winner’s Circle, I took less and less pleasure climbing the podium. Not only was I exhausted, but there were fewer people in the crowd whose opinions really mattered to me anymore. I’d sacrificed them all to get there.
Motivated by fear
Though I still hear from that voice from time to time, her visits have become less impactful and less frequent. I’ve worked hard on this over the years — reminding myself not to trust her, to question her agenda instead of simply accepting her terms outright. Because at some point, the message got through my hard, stubborn head loud and clear: Winning is momentary, and so is losing. Success and failure, milestones and setbacks, all these plot points that we think make up our lives are nothing but infinitesimal micro-dots on the long, unmarked stretches where we’re actually living.
When I’m in the pursuit of goals in order to prove myself, I’m motivated by fear. Which means that no matter what happens in the teeny tiny moment of “success,” I’ve given up all of my time leading up to it living in fear.
Fear is clever and mean, chatty and inventive. Fear is smug in its certainty that once you’ve conquered one monster, there’s another just behind it, ready to pounce. It makes something like applying to grad school for poetry sound like this:
“Fear is clever and mean, chatty and inventive. Fear is smug in its certainty that once you’ve conquered one monster, there’s another just behind it, ready to pounce.”
If you want to call yourself a “real” writer, you have to get an MFA.
And you can’t go to just any MFA program, you have to go somewhere with name recognition, somewhere both other writers and non-writers have heard of.
And if you want to be taken seriously by your peers in your program, then you have to get a fellowship.
Fear-motivated ambition is always upping the ante, always raising the stakes on you and pushing, pushing, pushing. It’s not just hungry, it’s insatiable. There is no feast big enough or rich enough to satisfy it — you sit down at the table and you have to just keep eating. It’s like tripping into the world’s bleakest grownup version of If You Give A Mouse A Cookie, only almost all the cookies taste terrible, but the kitchen keeps making them, promising you the best one is still coming, one that will make all these horrible cookies worth it.
But y’all, I’ve eaten so many cookies I don’t think I believe in a good one anymore. They are all starting to taste the same.
Ambition without misery
I am a goal-oriented person. I’m like Santa, making my lists and checking them twice, getting a thrill from the sense of accomplishment that comes from a line of checks down my little boxes each day. There is something fundamentally satisfying in finishing, and I am in no way attempting to write an argument against ambition. Ambition is just a powerful desire and the determination to pursue it. Wanting isn’t intrinsically “bad” but deeply human. We are motivated by desire, by what we want. And we are able to create beautiful experiences and solve devastating problems this way.
“Ambition is just a powerful desire and the determination to pursue it. Wanting isn’t intrinsically ‘bad’ but deeply human.”
But “want” has a shadow side, too. Because to desire is to be in a state that is, first and foremost, without. We want what we do not have. Again, the wanting itself isn’t morally wrong or right — not even the object of our desire is always so easy to moralize. It’s the motivation, however, what inspires and drives us to pursue this goal, where things get tricky. While we might set out to achieve a goal with the idea that success will include happiness, the truth is that if we aren’t careful, the pursuit in and of itself may gut us right at the start.
So, as a goal-oriented person who loves to feel the satisfaction of achievement, is it possible to pursue my ambitions without sacrificing my happiness?
My honest answer is: Sometimes! Maybe.
I’m trying, anyway.
Remember how my friend asked me if I thought we might be happier if we stopped writing? I reacted the way that I did because the very idea was a threat to something I’ve been taught my whole life — that I am a writer, which means I must not only write, but also pursue high-visibility and profitable writing-related accomplishments to prove it.
I’m not just talking about putting words on the page, but about the ambitious pursuit of writing: networking, querying, publishing, branding, etc. All the things that will make the world believe that I am Being A Writer.
It also made me realize that the answer scared me, because the truth is that in many ways yes — I think a part of me would be happier if I stopped writing.
“The truth is that in many ways yes — I think a part of me would be happier if I stopped writing.”
I stopped writing during the first year after my daughter was diagnosed with diabetes. And though I wouldn’t call the year a net positive on the happiness front, I can say that there was a sort of relief that came with streamlining my pursuits. I didn’t have to wake up in the dark, wee hours of the morning to sneak in a word count before work; I listened to music while walking the dog instead of research podcasts. If I found myself with unexpected free time, I watched something fun or took a nap, and didn’t feel guilty about not opening the manuscript. Instead of carrying around nothing but the questions for my novel, I was able to think about other things in my life. It made me realize how much I’d been ignoring in order to work on this project, and it reminded me of the person I was when I was spending all hours at an office job for a reward that never came.
And yet. I missed writing. And I wanted to finish my book. Because even when it was hard, it felt worthwhile to overcome its challenges. So I wanted to find out how I could do it, without destroying my life in the process.
Holding my ambition loosely
Toni Morrison said that failure was just more information. So the good news is that I have a lot more information this time around.
First, I made a sort of fun and silly goal: to rewrite my novel, from scratch, in a month.
“Toni Morrison said that failure was just more information. So the good news is that I have a lot more information this time around.”
This is no SMART goal — there’s very little we might call “realistic” about it. But it’s also not impossible, as long as I compromise the right things. This time, instead of sacrificing my health, my relationships, and all the things that generally make up my daily life, I’m sacrificing perfection. Because the goal isn’t to prove that I’m a “good” writer at all! The goal is to write a whole novel in a stupidly short amount of time. Finishing the thing is all I’m trying to do — not write a masterpiece from scratch.
Second, I’m keeping a Substack for accountability. This is a tricky one, because on the one hand, social media of any kind is like a siren song to me. But on the other hand, I know I do better with sticking to my goals when they are somewhat visible. So, I’m keeping an online record, only I’m not letting myself treat it with any more attention than strictly necessary: I write the updates in one shot, don’t edit them, and rarely re-read them once they’re live. The Substack is not the project; the book is. Writing the Substack is a tool to keep me on track. Will there be typos? Yes. Will they be too long? Oh, for sure. Does this mean anything about me at all? Absolutely not.
Ambition can be rewarding, but I am no longer interested in playing a zero sum game that pits my self-worth against my output. There is value in the pursuit of a goal, in and of itself. I have value as a person, whether I write a bestseller or a bad Substack that only five people read. But those five people? My absolute inner circle, my nearest and dearest — the real ones who know what kind of person I am no matter what I achieve. Finishing the book in a month is a challenge, and there are going to be times when it feels hard and I’ll want to give up. But I also know it feels good to perservere — and it feels even better to do it on my own terms. And even better when the people on the sidelines cheering me on are going to do so no matter what happens at the finish line. Because I already matter to them.
“There is value in the pursuit of a goal, in and of itself. I have value as a person, whether I write a bestseller or a bad Substack that only five people read.”
This is no game of Floor is Lava — I’m going to try not to touch the ground, sure, but also if I do? Well *spoiler alert* the floor is not lava at all actually; it’s just the floor. So I’ll just put my foot down to steady myself, and get right back up there. Because I already have value; I’ve already won.
Stephanie H. Fallon is a Contributing Editor at The Good Trade. She is a writer originally from Houston, Texas and holds an MFA from the Jackson Center of Creative Writing at Hollins University. She lives with her family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where she writes about motherhood, artmaking, and work culture. Since 2022, she has been reviewing sustainable home and lifestyle brands, fact-checking sustainability claims, and bringing her sharp editorial skills to every product review. Say hi on Instagram or on her website.
The post Will Living A Less Ambitious Life Make Me Happier? appeared first on The Good Trade.
