The End of Ambition

 

There comes a time, often without notice, when you quietly transition from someone with ambition to someone who accepts that certain things will not happen for you professionally. I have been thinking a lot about this lately because I realized I am now on the other side of things. As the old saying about bankruptcy goes, it happens gradually than suddenly. Some promotional opportunities I did not get that chipped away at my self-confidence (maybe I am not as smart and talented as I thought I was). A whisper or two about being difficult to work with (sorry for having high standards of the people who work for me). My own bad decisions when presented with options and choosing the wrong one.

The story has layers and I cannot point to any one thing that led me to this place, just an accumulation over time. Mike Ehrmentraut observed that we all make choices and those choices put us on a road that leads in a certain direction and that sometimes those decisions seem small but they are choices nonetheless. I think there is a lot of truth to that. Personally, I think of it more like being on a road headed in a certain direction – you have some goal you are trying to reach, for me, it was to become a judge – and you make decisions you think will get you closer to that goal. Over time, your choices get you closer to, or, in my case, completely out of reach, of that goal. Worse, those decisions, ones you made and ones others made for you, affect your day-to-day livelihood. The annoying clients. The endless office bureaucracy. The assignments you do not like but cannot turn down. The dipshit partners who think you are simply a cog in the machine and could not give one tiny shit about your well-being. It all piles up.

And if that was not enough, being of a certain age tempers your motivation to change things. Why go on a job search for something else that will make me unhappy in different ways when I can just wait a few years and retire? Am I willing to give up the things that I like about my job (or at least view as selling points) such as the short commute, decent retirement benefits, and health plan, for a job that I might have to drive longer to do, will contribute money into a different retirement account instead of just staying here and investing in the one I have, and might make me change doctors who are not in whatever plan this hypothetical other job uses. And that is before I even get into looking for such a job and going through the interviews, etc. etc.

Not to mix metaphors, but all of this also has that frog in the boiling pot of water vibe to it. You know that one – a frog put in room temperature water will be slower to jump out as the heat gets turned up but if you dropped a frog into a pot of already boiling water, it will jump out immediately. Things have sucked for a while, except they always seemed manageable but now I just feel so deeply unhappy knowing that there is nothing ahead of me but day after soul crushing day of misery until I can quit this shit job and it just makes me fucking miserable.