The title for this piece came from a friend. I never asked him exactly what he meant by not striving, but if I use him as a footnote—a person devoted to refinement, pleasure, and the small textures of living—then a life that does not obsess over "getting ahead" sounds almost ideal.
The problem is that getting ahead has always been a blurry idea. It has no clear scale, no fixed unit, nothing measurable. And concepts that cannot be measured tend to become vague enough to mean whatever people want them to mean.
There is a popular question online: What is the least ambitious person you’ve ever seen like? One highly upvoted answer describes someone like this:
- anxious about their current situation, but lacking the resolve to follow through on change;
- enthusiastic for three minutes at a time, often angry at themselves for never pulling it together, and most consistent only at failing to persist;
- longing for love, yet too exhausted to seriously pursue or sustain it;
- spending entire days drifting through social media, face lit by the cold glow of a phone or computer, while having almost no one they can really talk to.
It stings because it feels familiar. For many people, this is not some rare failure case. It is ordinary life. If that is true, then does "not striving" simply describe the default condition of the majority?
Over the years, more and more labels have appeared for people to attach to themselves. "Unable to love." "OCD." "The original family" as an all-purpose framework for explaining emotional damage. Then came "procrastination," the famous slouching-on-the-couch posture, and "lazy cancer," the jokingly exaggerated language people use for inertia and helplessness. More recently there is the fashion for doom and gloom as an identity in itself—like the world of BoJack Horseman, all glittering excess on the outside, but inwardly lost and despairing.
The constant turnover of these cultural moods suggests not only an age that has stopped believing in progress, but one that has become faintly pathological.
Psychology and science keep telling us: yes, these conditions are real; yes, people are not simply choosing to be this way; yes, illness exists. But many of those who publicly announce themselves as terminal procrastinators are not really seeking a cure. Their confessions on social platforms often feel less like asking for help and more like displaying a badge.
So is striving necessarily the right answer?
At some point, "being ambitious" quietly became interchangeable with "being successful." And if you look at what kinds of books have sold best over the last decade—excluding school materials—the largest share may well belong to manuals of success. Morning journals. Get Things Done. The Pomodoro method. Decluttering systems. Some are dressed up as management books or biographies, but the core message is usually the same: follow my method and you, too, can succeed.
There really are people who read dozens of books a year, almost all of them in this category. They take detailed notes. They summarize those notes into yet more systems for self-improvement, as if one layer of success methodology can be refined into another.
And what exactly is that success supposed to look like? Buying several apartments in a major city? Becoming a senior executive? Working overtime every day? Having no time for a spouse, no time for children, no room left for the pleasures of life? By conventional standards, that probably counts as success. But is it a life you actually want?
What is absurd is not that society wants success so badly. It is that even while chasing it so intensely, people still cannot define it clearly.
Between ambition and collapse, anxiety is the force that matters most.
The economy is weak. Jobs are brutally competitive. Work piles up into endless overtime. Housing prices keep climbing. Relationships? Hard to talk about romance when one is already struggling alone. Marriage guarantees happiness? Raising a child can feel financially ruinous. Abroad there is instability and war; at home there is unfairness; then there is healthcare, elder care, and every other slow-burning dread that can turn a person gray.
After enough exhaustion, enough scrambling, enough emotional depletion, a tempting strategy appears: expect less. Lower every hope. If nothing is expected, then disappointment cannot hurt, and anxiety might finally loosen its grip.
But deep down, everyone knows this is not a solution. Problems remain problems even if you stop resisting them. I do not know how many people feel guilty after nothing more dramatic than spending a weekend doing absolutely nothing.
I keep returning to one sentence: Why must youth always mean running and sweating? Why can’t it also mean idling away the afternoon by a river?
That may be the real question.
Not whether ambition is good or bad. Not whether decline has become fashionable. Not whether there is a diagnosis for our weariness.
But this instead: how do you spend each day without striving, and still feel entirely at peace with it?