Horny Heart

Why your ambition is overrated and your life is fundamentally pornographic

“How do you find a balance between material ambitions and spiritual ambitions? I find that movement in one direction stalls the other - they seem antithetical. Am I missing something?”

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Ambition is greatly overrated.

I know this is a controversial statement to make, especially in a society in which ambition is considered one of the highest virtues a person can possess. But it is not for me.

I am not opposed to ambition. I just don’t think most people have introspected deeply enough into why they possess the ambitions they do, what the real drivers of these ambitions are, and most importantly, what factors their ambitions are constrained by.

When I look back on my life, I can see that the things that motivated me twenty years ago were limited at best and foolish at worst. My own understanding of the world, of myself, of other people, of relationships, of what in this life is of true value and so on, was deeply conditioned by what the world had told me it was.

And so the ambitions I held so near and dear to my own heart, weren’t really my own. The dreams I envisioned for myself and the goals I set out to achieve were borrowed, stolen and repurposed from the myriad cultural ideals that had been stuffed into my brain since I had been a child.

I had no clear sense of who I was, where I was, when I was. So, how then could I have formed a clear sense of who I would become, where I would arrive and when that eventuality would come to fruition?

Most of my peers were shooting for dreams like - “First million by 30” or “House with a white picket fence, a dog, a husband and two kids (a boy and a girl) by 30” or “Travel to 50 countries in the next 10 years”. Meanwhile, I prided myself on my uniqueness because my own ambition was, “Spiritual enlightenment by 25”.

So, while the first worked his ass off to rise through the corporate ranks, the second went in search of a suitable mate with the right balance of financial and emotional stability and the third packed a backpack and set off to teach English in a foreign country. Meanwhile, I intensified my meditation practice because I believed I was the only one on the real quest for happiness, peace and equanimity while the others were off on wild goose chases.

The first guy did, in fact, make his first million by 30. But then set his sights on 10 mil by 40. The second gal did find the right guy but lost her patience when he failed to propose to her after five years of them being together. Last I heard, she is still single. The girl who set off to conquer the world, is still travelling. She has visited nearly every country on the planet and isn’t sure how to stop. Meanwhile, I came to realize that I was also on a wild goose chase all along.

Who are the winners and who are the losers in this story? I would argue we were all losers.

“In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst, the last is a real tragedy!” - Oscar Wilde

As I look back upon my life, I see clearly that the things that have brought true happiness were never the things I consciously went in search of. And the things that I craved to manifest, that occupied my conscious desire for hours on end, never brought any lasting happiness.

There is a fundamental flaw in viewing ambition as a virtue. It precludes that such ambition emerges from a place of self-knowledge and understanding. Yet, that is rarely the reality. For most people, what drives ambition is the desire to feel a sense of self-worth, a sense of completion and wholeness, a sense of value and meaning.

Therefore, what truly drives ambition for the majority is a lack of self-esteem, a feeling of incompleteness and sense of unworthiness and nihilism.

Can one begin with a faulty premise and stumble upon something authentic? If one is fortunate it may happen. But that is more the result of serendipity than of good choices. Most are doomed to fail - whether or not they achieve what they set out to achieve.

Because the goal is the decoy. The objective is an impostor. The dream is a distortion of the reality we truly desire. And that is simply to feel content, whole and intimately connected with the life we are living.

I have encountered only a few individuals who truly fit that bill, and not a single one of them harbored any great ambitions.

These individuals were just as driven as anyone else, to go about their day and achieve things. But they did so from an entirely different space. While most people are driven to achieve more than what they have, these folks were driven to make the most out of what they already had.

When I lived in Hokkaido, Japan some years ago, there was a small restaurant in the village of Kuriyama that had stood there for decades. Aji No Tokoro appeared from the outside nothing more than a rustic farmhouse, warm and inviting, a local eatery in a town of 10,000. The elderly couple who ran it were well known and loved in the community. The restaurant had limited seating, only about 10 to 15 patrons could be accommodated at a time, so reservations were typically encouraged. The restaurant had not raised its prices in over a decade, even as inflation had reached astronomical levels. Regardless of one’s economic background, one could expect to eat a meal there on an affordable budget.

There’s something else I forgot to mention. Aji No Tokoro had two Michelin stars.

The owner and chef, who specialized in Kaiseki (a traditional Japanese multi-course cuisine), was so famous and revered, that patrons from Tokyo and Osaka would often fly into Sapporo and drive to Kuriyama in time for lunch and then fly back out in order to be home for dinner the same evening.

My wife and I had the tremendous privilege of eating there a few times. Once, we asked the “master” why his prices were so low and why, despite his fame and the Michelin stars, had he chosen not to raise them, to expand his restaurant or to open a larger fine dining establishment in the big city. At this he simply grinned, and without looking up from his prep table on which he was plating our dish, replied:

“Why would I want all that hassle when I already get to do what I love?”

It occurred to me then, that the reason he did not want more was because he had learned the art of making the most out of what he already had. And the joy this gave him was palpable. It exuded from every pore of his being and infused his every action. You could taste it in his food. The flavors were so profound and ecstatic, you could experience, for the short-lived duration of the meal, what it felt like to be whole.

That is not what ambition looks like. Ambition devalues what we currently possess by externalizing it and projecting it upon future objects, goals, people and events based on some crude and poorly thought out value system the world has established for us.

Learning to make the most of what one has is the true art. Because one begins from the position of: “what I possess is already of tremendous value and worth”. All action that stems from such a place then becomes an exploration of how one can creatively use those resources in ways that further inspire. And that action can take on all forms - whether material, artistic, academic, athletic, spiritual and so on.

A person whose curiosity is naturally orientated towards finance and the economics of wealth generation may look at the $10 in their pocket with a feeling of gratitude. And they may wonder how to creatively invest this $10. When that $10 becomes a $100, they may imagine how to continue growing it in innovative ways. And when that $100 becomes $1M, $10M or even $1B - nothing has really changed for them. They are just as grateful for the $1B as they were for the $10. Because generating wealth was never about arriving at some finite destination. Instead, it is the medium through which they have chosen to express their innate sense of joy and wholeness. It is a form of play, nothing more.

Not everyone is orientated towards wealth generation (although the world will try and convince you to do so regardless). We all play in different ways. Some play with food, some with music, some with sports, some with business, some with scientific research, some with raising a family and building a community, some with spiritual exploration. There is no right way to play.

But when life no longer appears a game. When life becomes a real and serious thing - that is when it ceases to feel like play. It becomes a burden we are destined to suffer, and we then convince ourselves that we must find a strategy for freedom. And this is what ambition is. A flawed strategy aimed to free us from our imagined burdens.

At the age of 28, I had missed my deadline for achieving “enlightenment” and felt deeply frustrated and at my wits’ end. I saw up and coming spiritual teachers, younger than I was, who appeared to have ‘arrived’ at this holy grail and my heart burned with envy. I remember sitting in my car one day, consumed by this energy of craving a future that I had always believed and envisioned was mine to have and could not understand why it was being kept from me.

Then, quite spontaneously, my attention shifted away from my own thoughts towards that craving energy in my body. I honed in on it and attempted to locate exactly where in my body that energy was manifesting and discovered that it was in my chest surrounding my heart.

And then I had an epiphany. I realized I knew this energy well. It had the same kind of flavor, the same density and the same viscosity as the energy of intense sexual desire I often felt during a sexual fantasy . The only difference was in the location of the energy within the body.

I realized in that moment that I had a “horny heart”. That I was simply in a state of emotional arousal not all that different than that of sexual arousal. And that state of arousal was distorting my entire perception of life and my value system.

My horny heart made the world around me seem valueless and made my self appear worthless. At the same time, it projected immense value upon the images of an ideal future and perceived tremendous worth in that version of my self that I wished to one day become.

I realized that my relationship with life had been fundamentally pornographic - one in which I had fetishized scenarios, role plays and outcomes to the point that they had hijacked my consciousness and had compelled all my choices. I was masturbating my own mind, addicted as I was to that state of arousal which promised some final ecstatic release. Yet, even when that release did come, it was always short-lived. And the aftermath was always one of further frustration and alienation.

I had objectified myself. I had objectified life. And in the process, I had lost my connection to that innate joy that is an inherent aspect of the experience of being alive.

“Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do.
Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you.
Sanity means tying it to your own actions.”

I was recently reminded of this quote by Marcus Aurelius when it appeared on my Substack feed. I hadn’t read Meditations since University, and I listened to the audiobook version yesterday.

And I realized how much has changed in my reality today when compared with that of my twenty year old self’s.

My well being back then was very much tied to what other people said and did. And in the moments it wasn’t, it was inevitably tied to the things that happened to me.

But now I have come to sanity, for my well being is tied to my own actions alone.

And such sanity is the highest form of enlightenment I could ever imagine aspiring to.