The Gen Z Urge of Ambition

Ambition, Now with Instructions

Burning the present to create the future - according to the internet, this is supposedly what ambition looks like now.

There is a starter pack!

No phone for thirty minutes after waking. Read fifty pages before sunrise. Do yoga or a workout – preferably both – oh and make sure you get sunlight as soon as you wake up (which is ambitious in itself at 7am in the dead of winter in Northern Europe). Meditate. Drink a litre of water. Eat breakfast within half an hour or your hormones will apparently stage a coup. Then work your silly little heart out while also making time for social interaction, hobbies, meal prepping, skincare, and another fifty pages of that book before bed.

Gen Z is, statistically, doing better. We go to the gym more. We drink less. We eat healthier foods. In the UK and the US this shift towards wellness is well documented, and I don’t doubt that it has helped a lot of people. A generation taking control of its health.

And yet, something doesn’t quite add up. A global UNICEF survey found that 40% of Gen Z feel they need help with their mental health and yet 60% of them still feel hopeful and want to contribute to shaping a better future. We are not apathetic or disengaged. We are trying.

There are countless reasons for this tension, but one of them, I think, has something to do with the way ambition is operating. Somewhere along the way, the wellness trend quietly replaced intuition. Instructions arrive fully formed, delivered with absolute confidence by strangers on Instagram who seem remarkably certain about what your nervous system requires before 8am.

And it is easy to follow them or to feel conflicted by them. Not because we are all terribly shallow or easily influenced as a generation, but because we want things to work out. We want a future that feels stable and purposeful. So, it feels easier to outsource listening to ourselves, trading gut feeling for optimisation. We can collect rules and to-do lists in the hope of living life ‘correctly’ so that stability will materialise.

But when did rules start sounding more trustworthy than our own bodies?

Are we practising ambition in a way that allows us to be present and human, rather than managing ourselves like machines that must be ready for output?

Idealism with a Deadline

I am a Libra, which makes me an air sign. Though I respect the genre, I don’t know much about astrology, but I can recognise myself in ‘air’. The trouble with air is that it floats. Left entirely to my own devices, I drift into idealism, into imagining what could be, into futures so vivid they start to feel urgent. That’s where ambition lives for me: in possibility and the rush of imagining myself climbing toward something impactful. 

But catch me on a bad day and that airiness becomes something else. A desperation to control the near future so thoroughly that nothing can go wrong. Because if I optimise everything, then surely I can create that impactful future.

 This is usually the point at which intuition gives way to management. When ambition becomes anxiety, we stop listening and start monitoring.

I’ve noticed that when my goal is clear, effort feels purposeful, but when that vision blurs and I am unsure of what I am building or why – I freeze. The work feels pointless. Why pour energy into something if I don’t even know where it’s meant to land?

A friend told me he feels the opposite. That having a plan feels suffocating, like it collapses the world too quickly. For him, possibility lives in not knowing. For me, possibility needs a direction to lean into. Neither is right or wrong – but it made me realise how easily ambition gets flattened into a single ideal.

Which brings me back to the question I keep circling: what actually is ambition?

It is often presented as a performance. I’ve been showcased like a polished trophy of ambition. Minnie plans to study there, go to that country, or do this project. Minnie has a plan.

And yet, I’d be lying if I said my ego didn’t enjoy it on occasion. Somewhere in me, a voice perks up and says yes, that’s right, please do pat me on the back.

We learn so early that having a plan – even if it is born out of anxiety about not having one – is rewarded. Labelled ambitious. As if certainty itself is the actual virtue, not ambition.

Maybe that is where things slip. Ambition, at least in its current packaging, leaves little room for intuition, uncertainty, or rest. The future becomes measurable and, in doing so, strips away much of what is intangible – limiting us.

Is ambition a spectator sport?

According to our dear old friend social media, simply wanting a good, steady and balanced life is no longer enough to qualify as ambition. We must also be compelling, marketable and exceptional. (Or, more cynically, endlessly productive – perhaps that’s just my suspicion of how much modern ambition conveniently aligns with growing economic demands).

I’ve never been particularly comfortable calling myself ambitious. The word has always carried a weight of expectation. In a culture of immediacy, ambition can feel like a contract to overwork in advance. Because rest and indulgence have somehow become more and more synonymous with laziness or moral failure.

And somewhere in that shift, ambition quietly mutates. It can slip into perfectionism and judgement.

I am currently reading Margaret Atwood’s memoir. She writes about the ‘body double’ – the everyday self, and the other who does the work.

I think she is right. In whatever work we do, there is the version of us that appears in what some call the ‘flow state’, and then there is the version who makes quippy remarks, lies in bed for too long, and forgets things. In the ‘flowing self’, there is no self-surveillance or critique. Just movement toward something that feels alive. Ambition without pressure.

The difficulty, of course, is allowing ourselves to flow in all states, especially when we are confronted with shame in our lives – with memories, expectations, or situations that remind us of the mistakes and pressures that hurt us most. When we live with shame, ambition turns into survival. We fawn or flee, we armour up and instead of acting from our values, we act from imagined judgement, guessing which version of ourselves will be most self-protecting or acceptable. Motivation stops being forward-facing and becomes reactive, shaped by fear rather than curiosity.

The word ambition comes from the Latin ambitio, meaning ‘a going around’. It originally described Roman political candidates moving through crowds, rallying support. Ambition at its root is therefore communal and relational. 

Yet today, in a digital economy of visibility, ambition has been recoded as standing out, as individualism. Every CV must shimmer; every identity must be optimised. We are told to live our truth – but only within very specific, contradictory parameters. Be confident but not arrogant; be independent but desirable; exceptional but relatable. We invent archetypes – the pick-me, the simp, the sweat, the boring, the slut – and then act surprised when everyone feels trapped by them.

We are a generation under consistent scrutiny. Every generation has its pressures; ours lives inside a surveillance loop. Phones, platforms, permanent visibility. Mistakes travel fast and context travels slowly. Judgement often arrives before empathy.

And when you are unsure of yourself, it becomes dangerously easy to outsource your own judgement to the imagined opinions of others. 

It is hard enough forming an identity in a world that expects achievement by the age of 25 while offering stability closer to 35. Maybe ambition, in its original sense, needs reclaiming – not as isolation or exceptionalism, but as movement with others. Going around – being supported and supportive.

Being as well as Becoming

For years, my only non-negotiable was growth – particularly through education. I wanted to be the most ‘grown’ version of myself at all times. I took that to mean excessively cutting away anything that didn’t contribute to that trajectory, anything that demanded time or energy without obvious return. I lost experiences and people as a result.

But life is not meant to be efficient. It is not meant to be saved up - not our time, not our energy, not our joy. Someone dear to me knows how to live in time, not on it. He rarely notices it passing – which does result in a lack of punctuality on occasion – but watching him move through life with that ease teaches me, daily, that feeling constantly indebted to your future is not the same as being present.

Ambition is not about speed or self-sacrifice for the sake of productivity. It is the ability to move forward while staying present; trusting that delay is not derailment, competition is worth less than community, and that not knowing is not failure.

We are not doomed to race clocks, to-do lists, or one another. Ambition is meant to feel energising – not like a slow erosion of ourselves in the name of a future we are already too exhausted to inhabit.