Musings on the nature(s) of ambition

So I heard last Thursday that Paul Graham had written a new essay about how ambition manifests itself in different cities. I like thinking about cities, and sure enough, I like a couple of quotes from the article.

The people you find in Cambridge are not there by accident. You have to make sacrifices to live there. It's expensive and somewhat grubby, and the weather's often bad. So the kind of people you find in Cambridge are the kind of people who want to live where the smartest people are, even if that means living in an expensive, grubby place with bad weather.

It's not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.

But well before reading it I'd already had some good conversations with friends about ambition, and different things ambition can be about. It's a topic it seems I was primed to think about. It was especially good to talk this over with V, a friend from college who was in town last night; I love how old friends make you take a step back (and keep you up talking until 2 in the morning). We talked about how it's funny to still feel ambitious after you realize you don't necessarily want to climb the ol' corporate ladder, or perhaps don't want to be the richest person on earth, but you still feel ambitious and after a long time you start trying to put words to what you're striving for.

And we talked (and I talked with dr_alycat also) about families as a focus of ambition. People who want kids and are my age -- and how they fascinate me, especially knowing they're the norm! -- are usually just at the beginning of creating the family that they want. I'm flashing on the Sims 2 suddenly, and how every Sim has one of a few major motivators... one of them is Family... and it struck me yesterday that my no-kids decision makes me a real slacker in this regard! I've achieved my goals for family life already. While they don't seem to me like I'm aiming low (I want to have an awesome marriage and keep it that way, and happy kitties of course), what I've built is definitely less difficult than having and maintaining, say, a close-knit 5-human-being family. I thoroughly love what I have, and I would choose it again and again, but I wonder for the first time if people who are more into family-building might see the whole thing as kind of a stunted effort. I never got how my not wanting kids could appear "sad" to anyone, and have been known to get blindingly furious over the issue... but maybe to some people it just seems slacker-sad, like how I might feel if a bright, competent kid decided not go to college. What do you think; could I be right? It makes so much sense.

I had to go look some things up. In the Sims 2 basic game, the five possible apirations are Knowledge, Fortune, Romance, Popularity, and Family.

And Paul Graham's city-centric essay says So far the complete list of messages I've picked up from cities is: wealth, style, hipness, physical attractiveness, fame, political power, economic power, intelligence, social class, and quality of life. (He follows up with: My immediate reaction to this list is that it makes me slightly queasy, which I find rather endearingly human.)

Isn't it strange that Family didn't make his list at all? But maybe not; he was focusing on cities, after all, which do tend to be otherwise motivated.