Family or Ambition - Is It That Simple?

I came across this article published in The Atlantic just now. It has got few of my Facebook friends reviewing their lives and priorities.

The article starts by making itself relevant in this particular month, this is the time of the year when many youngsters will leave homes for college or University for degrees and maybe never return home. It talks about a person who left his small town in Louisiana for good, a long time ago and was thus separated from his sister. While this person went on to be a hot-shot reporter with all the glamour and living the life of big cities, his sister stayed in the town, lived near parents, and worked as a school teacher in a local school. Many years later when the sister was diagnosed with lung cancer the reporter came back to be with her for 19 months. In this time he saw how the closely knit community supported her and took care of her. So the reporter decided to give up his career and moved to the town with his wife and two children.

The article quotes Barry Schwartz. I have been read and listened to Barry many times since I first heard his Ted Talk about happiness and constrains. In this article he is quoted to mention that family members and community are constrains and as his theory goes, restrictions can lead to a more satisfied and happy life, if not the most accomplished one.

The author characterizes ambitious people as inhuman: ambitious people tend to use other people as objects are unable to empathize with others, are unwilling to give up anything for the community, etc.. You get a picture of Dicken's Ebenezer Scrooge.

I want to make a few observations about this article:

First of all, I agree with the article and the general idea that ambition and accomplishment may not be correlated with long term happiness. This although can work in either direction. While this article uses it to say that ambitious people gave up a lot and ended up only as happy as the people who stayed with the community, I can use it to say the less ambitious gave up all the fun, experiences, and perhaps money and did not end up being happier than the (successful) ambitious person even if the ambitious person is more lonely at the end of life perhaps.

I like the qualifier that Barry Schwarz uses for the ambitious people'’s happiness. He says the ambitious people “who achieved what they wanted” are as happy... … Many ambitious people will not achieve what they want. That is the nature of the quest of ambition, whether it is for finding the gold mine (migrating with community and family and making new ones) or of discovering/fashioning mathematical theories (utilizing the stereotype of scientists) success is not guaranteed. You may end up as unhappy a person as your country cousin! 

I have read some Tolstoy, Robert Brown, and other poets who idealize the idyllic bucolic life. And then I have also read Anton Chekhov who italisizes (being Chekhov he would not have highlighted (: ) the frustrations of such a life.

Isn'’t it the personal ambition that has driven the Edward Jenners of our world to work against the ridicule of the community and experiment with inoculation? In fact the word Vaccine comes from the jokes the community members played on him when they suggested he was turning people into cows (Vacca, latin - n. cow). Later he decided to call the inocculations as vaccinations to make a point.

And isn't it that the idyllic and beautiful community in the article can also be the most mean and narrow minded community, keeping an eye on every move you make and telling you what to wear, who to talk to, what to talk about, and in some instances, how the world was made and how it will end. 

Which directly brings me to my next point. Being with a community is not always a personal choice. I know a man (a Muslim) and a woman (a Hindu/Buddhist) who married each other in love, and their family was given up on by their communities (which is to put it mildly since the man was attacked many times to the threat of death.)

10 years after the marriage when a brother of this man passed away, family and community members asked him to return to the native town. So the man decided to leave his job relocate his family. Children were in the middle of the school year. As soon as the family arrived everyone tried to convert his wife to Islam and telling the children that their mother was going to go to hell. And if they love their mother and be like her they too may be triple fried and salted. Luckily the man saw his senses and came back to his life and the far away city where he had made his ambitious career. In less than 3 months these same people who wanted him to come were fed up of him and his kafir family.

35 years after the marriage their second born daughter decided to try to mend the gaps in the families and start by going to a marriage function of a cousin on mother’s side (the Hindu/Buddhist version). She traveled to another city with much effort and sacrifice with her little daughters (3,5) where they were taunted, ridiculed and insulted repeatedly over her stay. She called her father and brothers and cried a lot and returned a smarter person with a rigid determination to never ever mix with the uneducated, uncouth and uncivilized lot.

My next thought is about being alone or loneliness at an older age. 

Charles Darwin was not a particularly dislikeable person. He was a nervous sort, but him and his family were destined to be lonely not because of that. He was bound to be lonely since he believed in, and said out loud, outrageous things like humans evolved out of monkey like species by some convoluted process of evolution instead of the nice and simple, and thus utmost logical theory that God created us from muck on His last working day, just before He went on a long vacation and stopped worrying about us. [By the way this does explain how George Bush became the president of the most influential nation of the world, evolution and logic cannot explain this.]


Inside of a quaint, cute, and cuddly little community, you can be forced to be lonely. Driving the wrong kind of motored vehicle (a motorcycle for example) can make you an outcast, forget about asking tough questions, or many other simple reasons: having a child with special needs, falling in love with the wrong person (different religion or caste) or at the wrong time (too young or too old), or with a wrong gendered person. 

There is a good reason why creative, ambitious, and generally different people flock to the cities. Cities and metro centers are (comparatively more) liberated spaces, where people are allowed to be different without the penalty of banishment or good old fashioned lynching. We are still left with the reported problem of ambitious people who are left alone at the end of their lives. Is that something any ambitious (and/or curious and/or individualistic) person should worry so much about that they live all their lives doing a job they don'’t like, stay married to a wrong person (or a person of wrong gender) or say hollow prayers to the God of the community per force? Or give up live music performances? Museums? International cuisines?

I guess the answer is personal. Your native community may be based in city and may be more educated, sensitive, flexible, and accommodating than mine. I guess the answer also changes depending on where you are in life. 

This month I have been accepted at a university in USA for a PhD course in Economics. I am going to leave India for a few years. I am not very ambitious in terms of a career, I just want to be an expert at a subject. I don’'t want to make a lot of money, just enough to be able to afford myself and my parents a comfortable life. I can’'t say I like everyone I meet, but no one can accuse me of using people as objects (and escape the projectile of the first heavy person I can get hold of). I have a couple of amazing friends a half-dozen family members I truly care about. But I am proving, even to myself, to be different. I am hoping I will find like-minded people in  my university, but I have a feeling that it is not the dearth of like-minded people that keeps me alone. I am just turned inwards. I am emotionally and socially different from most people.

Today I think: 'naaaahhh! I don'’t mind being alone'. I don’'t mind being alone in Chennai, I don’t mind being alone in Santa Cruz. There is so much to do and learn and read and write. And then there is Facebook (hah!). I will learn to live and be alone like a pro and when I am 70, I will be an expert loner. But this is today. Perhaps when I am sick and old, I may not agree with what I am thinking and saying now. I may regret my choices. I may even have become religious then!

What the eff, everything rots.