No. 5 Whatever Happened to Ambition?

What the hell ever happened to ambition?

That’s a question that always fails to keep me awake at night.

I’ll tell you where ambitions gone. It’s gone south, along with every other hope and dream we might once have nurtured. Just look at today’s young. There’s little ambition there, and why would there be?

Notice how the ones that are still harping on about ambition are usually the ones that haven’t done a day’s graft in their entire life?

Politicians, top businessman, fat-cat bosses, members of the Royal family; they all bang on about success coming with ambition, drive, and get up and go… Well to be honest, I’d rather stay in bed.

What’s left in this day and age for us to be ambitious about?

We have become a nation – nay, a world – crammed to bursting point with the disillusioned, the disenfranchised, the browbeaten, and the victimised. We’ve finally sussed the big lie that’s been force-fed to generation upon generation, by our politicians and our paymasters. The one that says ambition and hard work will bring its rewards.

So what is this reward? Redundancy? When those you’ve slaved hard for decide that you’re no longer of any use to them. Or is it reaching retirement age and being forced to work on until you keel over four years down the line whilst filling endless shelves with tins of cut-price beans, because the pension scheme you signed up for failed to mature as originally predicted, and the government refuse to provide a realistic living allowance for those who’ve contributed all their life to a system that’s quick to take, but conveniently forgets once you’ve served your purpose?

Take a look out of the window… if you can still afford windows. See how everybody looks so miserable? So despondent, gloomy, dejected, disheartened, depressed, dispirited, unhappy, forlorn, disconsolate, distressed…

… Scared…

Nobody smiles anymore. It’s head forwards, avoid eye contact; don’t even look at who’s just sat down next to you, they might accuse you of looking at their pint.

Once, maybe, there was a glimmer of hope. A chance that ambition may well reap its rewards; that keeping the nose to the grindstone might possibly pay us back in the long run. But even before these opportunities can be snatched so cruelly from our grasp, we hit sixteen, leave school and realise the only ones who do reap the rewards are the ones that don’t need ambition. The ones that have it handed to them on a solid silver plate.

Is it any wonder the youth of today turn out like they are? There’s nothing left to be ambitious for. Nobody to inspire. Only liars, cheats, and gangsta rappers.

And so the wealthy continue to perpetuate this lie in the hope that we will continue to believe it, and provide them with their never-ending conveyor belt of human product; gears for the cold machine. Tossed into the scrap bins once worn down or broken through overuse and ill-maintenance.

The incessant lies have eroded away our capacity for ambition. Replaced by the stark truth of the scrap bin that awaits us all.

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