UNWORTHY AMBITIONS
There are scores of people in our great cities who do not really live
at all. They merely exist. They are the slaves of a morbid ambition and
a greed that has grown to be a monster. Many of these people take very
little comfort; they are always on a strain to keep up appearances, to
maintain homes in portions of the city where they can ill afford to
live, to keep automobiles when they can barely afford a bicycle, to
wear clothing and jewelry which is beyond their means, and they keep
themselves constantly worried over it, killing their legitimate comfort
and enjoyment through the exhaustion of the strain and stress,--and
all for nothing that is real or permanent, nothing that adds to their
character or well being.
Such people have a perfect mania for trying to make other people think
they are better off than they really are, that they amount to more
than they really do, that they cut a bigger figure in the world than is
actually the case. In other words, they make themselves pitiable slaves
of other people’s eyes. They go through life not doing the things they
ought to do, what is best for their welfare and growth. Their lives
are superficial because they do not live in or deal in realities.
Everything about them is deceiving. They live masked lives. Few people
know them as they really are. They only know them as they pretend to
be. What do these people, who are always chasing shadows, get out of
life, anyway?
There is an ambition which reminds one of a bird whose voracious
appetite can never be satisfied. It grows on what it feeds, and the
more it eats, the more ravenous the appetite. Woe be it to him who
caters to a false ambition! He follows it blindly, expects that it will
give him peace when it is satisfied, but alas, it is never satisfied.
It is like the water in the enchanted story: the more the victim drank
of it, the greater was his burning thirst. Such an ambition is fatal,
and will surely wreck him who blindly pursues it. It will ruin his
health and will rob him of all that is dearest and sweetest in life.
There are a great many people in this country who are committing
suicide upon many years of their lives by being slaves of an inordinate
ambition.
One of the most pathetic phases of our civilization is that men and
women in poor health, devitalized from over-work, are goaded on way
beyond their strength by a fiendish ambition. Their pride and their
vanity say to them, “Now, it will not do to slow down. We must keep
up the pace with our neighbors. People who do not keep up appearances
in these days are nobodies. We must keep going, no matter how we feel.
We must make more money, we must show more evidence of our prosperity.
We must put up a better front or Mrs. Grundy will pass the suspicion
along that we are, after all, not much of a success, that we lacked
the ability to do what people thought we were going to do. No matter
how we feel we must keep up, keep pushing, keep going, crowd on more
steam, take stimulants and drugs, if necessary, goad ourselves on. It
is absolutely imperative to keep pushing.”
Oh, what fools pride and vanity make of us, especially when we are in
no condition to keep up the pace, when we owe it to ourselves to slow
down, when it is positively wicked to crowd on more steam! How many
people are driven into the grave by the lash of a mortgage on a farm,
on a home, or on their business, put there in an attempt to satisfy
some over-vaunting ambition!
Debt has made more people miserable, ruined the peace of mind of more
human beings, the comfort and the happiness of more homes, than almost
anything else in the universe. It is a terrible thing to so mortgage
oneself to others that we must make slaves of ourselves. How much
better to live simply, to struggle on in poverty until we can improve
our position than to compromise ourselves with debt, sell ourselves to
a mortgage, or a bill of goods!
What an easy thing it is to borrow money, to give a note or to give a
mortgage! We believe at the time that we can pay all right, but no one
can be certain that things will go all right with him. No one knows
what the times may bring forth. No one knows whether his health and
strength will be spared, or how soon he may be physically or mentally
disabled.
The only true measure of real success is the quality of the ambition.
If the animal figures too largely in your ambition, if the quality is
coarse, the success will be cheap, no matter how great the quantity.
It is an unfortunate thing that so many of our youth should start out
in life with only one aim; and that is to make money. This becomes
the leading purpose in their lives and warps their way of looking at
things. Everything else is seen in dwarfed proportions. They do not
consider making a life, building character; they are bent only on
making money. This is the all-absorbing topic everywhere.
The goal we hold in the mind is the model which shapes our lives, and
its character is reflected in everything we do. Think, therefore, what
the influence must be of pointing all our faculties, focusing all of
our energies upon the money-making goal! How it must warp and twist
and wrench out of their natural orbit the more delicate sentiments,
the finer faculties. When everything in us looks moneyward, and the
gaze is held persistently upon the dollar and what it will bring, what
must be the havoc, the tragedy, the fatal damage in the affections, the
friendships, and the social faculties! When the affections are chilled
and the friendships strangled what is there left in a man but the
monster, brute qualities?
This is why a youth who starts out with noble aspirations, with fine
sensibilities and responsive affections, often becomes hardened in his
business career. His finer sensibilities and more delicate faculties
atrophy from disuse, because he overdevelops the grasping, greedy,
selfish faculties by the modern mania for the almighty dollar.
The transformation is so insidious that he does not half realize it
until he finds himself stooping to scheming and plotting and underhand
cunning, which would have shocked him a few years earlier.
When a man once gets in the power of the selfish, greedy, grasping
monster within him, which he has fed and catered to so long that it has
become a giant, it is almost impossible to wrench himself away, and he
often becomes the slave of the very thing he once despised and loathed.
It is always a question of what is uppermost in the ambition, the
dominant aim, that shapes the life most. When a man has pursued an aim
for years which tends to dry up the best within him, when he has used
all of his life forces, all of his energies, to feed that unworthy
ambition until it has become a monster which controls him, he is a
pitiable creature. There is no more distressing sight in the world than
that of one who is completely in the clutches of a heartless, grasping,
greed. Spurred on by the morbid ambition which has taken possession of
him, he is madly pursuing the dollar which haunts him, until he is deaf
to all appeals of his finer self, and has lost all taste for that which
he once enjoyed.
Multitudes of people seem to think that if they were only in an ideal
environment, where they would be free from worry or anxiety regarding
the living-getting problem, if they were free from pain and in vigorous
health, they would be perfectly happy. As a matter of fact, we are
not half so dependent for happiness upon our environment, or upon
circumstances, as we sometimes imagine we are. False ambition, envy and
jealousy are responsible for much of our uneasiness, our restlessness
and discontent. Our minds are so intent upon what other people have and
are doing that we do not get a tithe of the enjoyment and satisfaction
out of our own work, out of our own possessions, that they should
afford us.
An inordinate ambition, a desire to get ahead of others, a mania to
keep up appearances at all hazards, whether we can afford it or not,
all these things feed selfishness, that corrosive acid which eats away
our possible enjoyment and destroys the very sources of happiness.
The devouring ambition to get ahead of others in money making, to
outshine others socially, develops a sordid, grasping disposition which
is the bane of happiness. No man with greed developed big within him
need expect to be happy. Neither contentment, satisfaction, serenity,
affection, nor any other member of the happiness family can exist in
the presence of greed, or an inordinate, selfish ambition.
We have had some conspicuous examples of political aspirants who have
put their personal ambition above their duty to their party and their
country. Time and again one or the other of the great political
parties has been well-nigh ruined by a man who could put his own
personal ambition against even his country’s welfare.
It is a dangerous thing to put personal ambition above duty, anyway,
but especially so to a politician or statesman, who is rendered doubly
dangerous if he possesses great magnetic qualities.
We do not always know where the following of ambition’s call will lead
us, but we do know this, that by being loyal to ambition and doing our
best to follow it in its normal, wholesome state, when not perverted by
selfishness, by love of ease or self-gratification, it will lead to our
best and highest welfare, that when we follow, when we put ourselves in
a position to give it the best and the freest scope, it will lead us
to the highest self-expression of which we are capable, and will give
us the greatest satisfaction. We know, too, that when our ambition is
perverted to base ends our lives go all awry; when we are false to the
higher voice within us, we are discontented, unhappy, inefficient, and
our lives are ineffective.
When a man becomes so infatuated with the mania for wealth, position,
fame or notoriety that he focuses his whole soul, all his powers and
energies, upon a false ideal,--upon a selfish, narrow goal, he develops
only a very small part of himself and he becomes very narrow. He lives
most who lives truest. He lives most who touches life in the largest
number of the largest and highest points.
Don’t start out in life with a false standard; a truly great man makes
official position and money and houses and estates look so mean and
poor that we feel like sinking out of sight with our cheap laurels and
our ill-earned gold.