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The Psychology and Philosophy of Ambition

Our highest achievement may not be what we accomplish, but who we become along the way.

Article revised on 22 July 2026.

‘Ambition’ derives from the Latin ambitio, ‘a going around (to solicit votes)’, and, by extension, ‘a striving for honour, recognition, and preferment’. The word originated in the Roman practice of canvassing for political office by going around among citizens and voters.

Ambition might be defined as a striving for some kind of achievement or distinction, and involves, first, the desire for such, and, second, the willingness to work towards it even in the face of adversity or failure. To be ambitious is to achieve first and foremost not for the sake of achievement itself (which is to be high-reaching) but for the sake of distinguishing oneself from others. Were we the last person on earth, it would make little or no sense to be ambitious.

Ambition is often confused with aspiration. But unlike mere aspiration, which has a particular goal for object, ambition is a trait or disposition, and, as such, is persistent and pervasive. Having achieved one goal, the truly ambitious person soon formulates another at which to keep on striving.

Ambition is often spoken of in the same breath as hope, as in ‘hopes and ambitions’. If hope is the desire for something to happen combined with an anticipation of it happening, ambition is the desire for achievement combined with the willingness to work towards it. The opposite of hope is fear, hopelessness, or despair; the opposite of ambition is ‘lack of ambition’, which is not in itself a negative state.

The Ancient Debate

Perhaps it is even the preferable state. In the East, ambition is seen as a vice or evil that, by miring us in worldly pursuits, holds us back from the spiritual life and its fruits of virtue, wisdom, and tranquillity. In the West, in contrast, ambition is lauded as a precondition of success, even though the Western canon broadly falls against it.

For instance, in the Republic, Plato says that, because they are devoid of ambition, good people shun politics, leaving us to be ruled by bad people and their petty ambitions. Even if invited, good people would refuse to rule, preferring instead to hide away in their studies and gardens. To force them out, Plato goes so far as to advocate a penalty for refusing to rule—perhaps something for us to consider in this day and age, if there are still any good people left.

Aristotle had a more nuanced take on ambition. In his Ethics, he defines virtue as a disposition to aim at the intermediate between excess and deficiency, which, unlike either extreme, is a form of success and therefore worthy of praise. Thus, in the sphere of ‘fear and confidence’, those who run headlong into every danger are rash, while those who flee from every danger are cowards, whereas courage lies in the intermediate or mean—the famous ‘golden mean’. Similarly, in the sphere of ‘minor honour and dishonour’, Aristotle names ‘ambition’ as the vicious excess, ‘lack of ambition’ as the vicious deficiency, and ‘proper ambition’ as the mean.

Aristotle’s virtues and vices. In case you’re wondering, the sphere of ‘major honour and dishonour’ concerns not ambition but pride.

To this day, we speak of ambition after Aristotle, as ‘healthy ambition’, ‘unhealthy ambition’, and ‘lack of ambition’. Healthy ambition can be understood as the measured striving for achievement or distinction, and unhealthy ambition as the disordered striving for such. While healthy ambition is constructive and enabling, unhealthy ambition is destructive and inhibiting, and, thus, more akin to greed.

The Psychology of Ambition

The highly ambitious are sensitive to failure, and experience almost constant dissatisfaction or frustration. As with Sisyphus, their task is never accomplished; and, as with Tantalus, their prize is always out of reach. Just as Tantalus had a rock dangling over his head, so the ambitious have the noose of failure hanging about their neck.

The fear of failure checks the ambition of all but the most courageous—or rash—of people. For just as mania can lead into depression, so ambition can lead into anguish and despair. To live with ambition is to live with fear and anxiety, unless, that is, the weight of our ambition can be alleviated by gratitude, which is the feeling of appreciation for all that we already have. Although gratitude is especially lacking in future-focused people, ambition is much less toxic if, even without it, life can still seem worth living.

We are not ambitious unless we are willing to make sacrifices—even though the end of our ambition may not be worth them, and not just because it may never be attained or approached. It could even be argued that, with pure, naked ambition, the end is never worth the sacrifice. Fortunately, ambition is rarely pure but usually admixed with unselfish aims and motives, even if these may be more incidental than deliberate and determining; and it may be that our greatest achievements—indeed, man’s greatest achievements—are all, or almost all, accidents of ambition. Simply put, society will not support our ambitions unless they are prosocial.

In that much, ambition is like the carrot that goads the donkey that pulls the cart. Studies have found that, on average, the ambitious attain higher levels of education and income, build more prestigious careers, and, despite the nocuous effects of their ambition, report higher levels of overall life satisfaction. Owing to bad luck and poor judgement, most ambitious people sooner or later fall short of their ambitions, but that still lands them far ahead of their less ambitious peers.

The Origins of Ambition

Why are some people more ambitious than others? To cut a long story short, ambition is a complex construct born out of a host of factors, including parental role models and expectations, birth order and sibling rivalries, fear of failure and rejection, feelings of inferiority or superiority, intelligence or lack thereof, past achievements, competitiveness, envy, anger, revenge, and the instinctual drives for life and sex.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, ambition can be understood as an ego defence, serving, like all ego defences, to enforce and uphold a certain idea of the self. Rather than ambition, which is a sophisticated defence, those who lack what it takes to put themselves out there are more likely to respond with less mature defences—for instance, by rationalizing that ‘life is unfair’ or that they are ‘less of a leader and more of a team-player’. If their ego is much bigger than their courage, they may become dismissive or even destructive, the latter also being a means of drawing attention or sabotaging themselves to provide a ready excuse for their lack of success: ‘It’s not that I failed, it’s that…’

A defence that merits particular attention in the context of ambition is sublimation, which is among the most mature and successful of all ego defences. If a person feels angry with his boss, he may go home and kick the dog—or he might instead go out for a long run. The first instance (kicking the dog) is an example of displacement, the redirection of uncomfortable feelings towards someone or something less important, which is an immature and destructive ego defence. The second instance (going out for a long run) is an example of sublimation, the channelling of uncomfortable feelings into positive or productive activities.

If someone discovers that she’s been cheated on, she might fly into a rage and cut up all her partner’s clothes—or she might instead write a poem to explore and express how she feels. And if the poem, or the poet, were one day to be remembered, would that not be the sweetest revenge of all?

A third example of sublimation, more pertinent to ambition, is the person with sadistic or homicidal urges who joins the military to provide an outlet for those urges—or who, like Justice Wargrave in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, becomes a hanging judge who doles out the death penalty to murderers. In the novel’s postscript, a fishing trawler dredges up a bottle just off the Devon coast. The bottle contains the confession of the late Wargrave, in which he reveals a lifelong sadistic temperament coupled with a fierce sense of justice. Though he had longed to torture, terrify, and kill, he could not bring himself to harm innocent people. So instead, he became a hanging judge and thrilled at the sight of convicted (and guilty) criminals trembling with fear.

Beyond Ambition

In life, few things are either good or bad. Rather, their good and bad depend on what we are able to make out of them. People with a high degree of healthy ambition are those with the insight and strength (strength that is often born out of insight) to control the blind forces of ambition, that is, to shape their ambition so that it matches their interests and ideals, and to harness it so that it fires them without also burning them or those around them.

The purpose of work is not to further our own interests, even if it is only a house in the middle of the woods that we seek, but to help others and move humanity forward—which is, in any case, the best way of furthering ourselves. The highest wisdom, born out of humility, is perhaps that it is not necessary to be ambitious to be high-reaching, or to feel alive. Indeed, it is often our conventional ambitions that are holding us down—even, that are killing us.

People shrink or expand into the degree and nature of their ambitions. Ambition needs to be cultivated and refined, and yet has no teachers.

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If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy The Art of Failure, an unconventional exploration of success, ambition, happiness, and the good life.

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This crayon drawing by a hospital in-patient with severe depression alludes to her temporary withdrawal from mainstream society. The months that she spent in hospital gave her the time and the solitude to think over her life, and the motivation to make difficult but necessary changes to it. She went on to make a full recovery.

Many a man curses the rain that falls upon his head, and knows not that it brings abundance to drive away the hunger. – St Basil the Great

Happiness is good for the body, but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind. – Marcel Proust

Depression around the world

There are important geographical variations in the prevalence of depression, and these can in large part be accounted for by socio-cultural factors. In traditional societies, human distress is more likely to be seen as an indicator of the need to address important life problems, rather than as a mental disorder requiring professional treatment. For this reason, the diagnosis of depression is correspondingly less common. Some linguistic communities do not have a word or even a concept for ‘depression’, and many people from traditional societies with what may be construed as depression present with physical complaints such as headache or chest pain rather than with psychological complaints. Punjabi women who have recently immigrated to the UK and given birth find it baffling that a health visitor should pop round to ask them if they are depressed. Not only had they never considered the possibility that giving birth could be anything other than a joyous event, but they do not even have a word with which to translate the concept of ‘depression’ into Punjabi!

In modern societies such as the UK and the USA, people talk about depression more readily and more openly. As a result, they are more likely to interpret their distress in terms of depression, and less likely to fear being stigmatised if they seek out a diagnosis of the illness. At the same time, groups with vested interests such as pharmaceutical companies and mental health experts promote the notion of saccharine happiness as a natural, default state, and of human distress as a mental disorder. The concept of depression as a mental disorder may be useful for the more severe and intractable cases treated by hospital psychiatrists, but probably not for the majority of cases, which, for the most part, are mild and short-lived, and easily interpreted in terms of life circumstances, human nature, or the human condition.

Another (non-mutually exclusive) explanation for the important geographical variations in the prevalence of depression may lie in the nature of modern societies, which have become increasingly individualistic and divorced from traditional values. For many people living in our society, life can seem both suffocating and far removed, lonely even and especially amongst the multitudes, and not only meaningless but absurd. By encoding their distress in terms of mental disorder, our society may be subtly implying that the problem lies not with itself, but with them. However, thinking of the milder forms of depression in terms of an illness can be counterproductive, as it can prevent people from identifying and addressing the important life problems that are at the root of their distress.

Problems with diagnosis

All this is not to say that the concept of depression as a mental disorder is bogus, but only that the diagnosis of depression may have been over-extended to include far more than just depression the mental disorder. If, like the majority of medical conditions, depression could be defined and diagnosed according to its aetiology or pathology, such a state of affairs could not have arisen. Unfortunately, depression cannot as yet be defined according to its aetiology or pathology, but only according to its clinical manifestations and symptoms. For this reason, a doctor cannot base a diagnosis of depression on any objective criterion such as a blood test or a brain scan, but only on his subjective interpretation of the nature and severity of the patient’s symptoms. If some of these symptoms appear to tally with the diagnostic criteria for depression, then the doctor is able to justify making a diagnosis of depression.

One important problem here is that the definition of ‘depression’ is circular: the concept of depression is defined according to the symptoms of depression, which are in turn defined according to the concept of depression. Thus, it is impossible to be certain that the concept of depression maps onto any distinct disease entity, particularly since a diagnosis of depression can apply to anything from mild depression to depressive psychosis and depressive stupor, and overlap with several other categories of mental disorder including dysthymia, adjustment disorders, and anxiety disorders. Indeed, one of the consequences of the ‘menu of symptoms’ approach to diagnosing depression is that two people with absolutely no symptoms in common can both end up with the same diagnosis of depression. For this reason especially, the concept of depression has been charged with being little more than a socially constructed dustbin for all manner of human suffering.

An adaptive role?

Every person inherits a certain complement of genes that make her more or less vulnerable to developing depression during her lifetime. A person suffers from depression if the amount of stress that she comes under is greater than the amount of stress that she can tolerate, given her vulnerability to developing depression. Genes for potentially debilitating disorders such as depression usually pass out of a population over time because affected people have, on average, fewer children than non-affected people. The fact that this has not happened for depression suggests that the responsible genes are being maintained despite their potentially debilitating effects on a significant proportion of the population, and thus that they are lending an important adaptive or evolutionary advantage.

There are other instances of genes that both predispose to an illness and lend an important adaptive advantage. In sickle cell disease, for example, red blood cells assume a rigid sickle shape that restricts their passage through tiny blood vessels. This leads to a number of serious physical complications and, in traditional societies, to a radically shortened life expectancy. At the same time, carrying just one allele of the sickle cell gene (‘sickle cell trait’) makes it impossible for malarial parasites to reproduce inside red blood cells, and so confers immunity to malaria. The fact that the gene for sickle cell anaemia is particularly common in populations from malarial regions suggests that, in evolutionary terms, a debilitating illness in the few can be a price worth paying for an important adaptive advantage in the many.

What important adaptive advantage could depression have? Just as physical pain has evolved to signal injury and to prevent further injury, so depression may have evolved to remove us from distressing, damaging, or futile situations. The time and space and solitude that depression affords prevents us from making rash decisions, enables us to see the bigger picture, and – in the context of being a social animal – to reassess our social relationships, think about those who are significant to us, and relate to them more meaningfully and with greater understanding. Thus, depression may have evolved as a signal that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing or, at least, understanding. Sometimes people can become so immersed in the humdrum of their everyday lives that they no longer have the time to think and feel about themselves, and so lose sight of their bigger picture. The experience of depression can force them to stand back at a distance, re-evaluate and prioritise their needs, and formulate a modest but realistic plan for fulfilling them.

Sorrow’s children

Although the experience of depression can serve such a mundane purpose, it can also enable a person to develop a more refined perspective and deeper understanding of her life and of life in general. From an existential standpoint, the experience of depression obliges the person to become aware of her mortality and freedom, and challenges her to exercise the latter within the framework of the former. By meeting this difficult challenge, the person is able to break out of the mould that has been imposed upon her, discover who she truly is, and, in so doing, begin to give deep meaning to her life. Indeed, many of the most creative and most insightful people in society suffer or suffered from depression. They include the politicians Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln; the poets Charles Baudelaire, Hart Crane, Sylvia Plath, and Rainer Maria Rilke; the thinkers Michel Foucault, William James, John Stuart Mill, Isaac Newton, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer; and the writers Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Graham Greene, Leo Tolstoy, Evelyn Waugh, Tennessee Williams, and many, many others.

The curse of the strong

People with depression are often stigmatised as ‘failures’ or ‘losers’. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, the sorts of people who are most vulnerable to developing depression are all the opposite of failures or losers. If they are suffering from depression, it is most probably because they have tried too hard or taken on too much, so hard and so much that they have made themselves ill with depression. In other words, if they are suffering from depression, it is because their world was simply not good enough for them. They wanted more, they wanted better, and they wanted different, not just for themselves, but for all those around them. So if they are failures or losers, this is only because they set the bar far too high. They could have swept everything under the carpet and pretended, as many people do, that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds. However, unlike many people, they had the honesty and the strength to admit that something was amiss, that something was not quite right. So rather than being failures or losers, they are just the opposite: they are ambitious, truthful, and courageous. And that is precisely why they got ill. Getting ill is never a good thing, but in the case of depression it can present a precious opportunity to identify and to address some very challenging life problems, and to develop a deeper and more refined understanding and appreciation of one’s life and of life in general.

A note of caution

Depression should not be romanticised, sought out, or left unattended simply because it may or may not predispose to problem-solving, personal development, or creativity. The most severe forms of depression have a strong biological basis and are not related to a person’s life circumstances or aspirations. All forms of depression are drab and intensely painful, and most people who suffer from depression would never wish it on anyone, least of all themselves. In some cases, depression can lead to serious injury or even to death through accident, self-neglect, or self-harm. Even highly successful people who suffered from depression such as Hart Crane and Sylvia Plath ended up committing suicide in the end, and most people who attempt suicide do so because they are suffering with some form of depression.