dispatches from the pandemic: peace is not a lack of ambition

A famous actor died, and the internet did what it does when someone famous dies.

It made the private fact of mortality public for a few days.

People posted tributes. Clips. Quotes. Photos. Arguments. Shock. Grief. Some genuine, some performative, most probably somewhere in the gray human middle. What stayed with me was not the celebrity of it. It was the age.

Early forties.

Old enough to have built a remarkable life. Young enough that everyone still said, “Too soon.”

Which, of course, it was.

But that phrase always bothers me a little because it implies there is some age when death becomes punctual.

There is not.

I had coffee around that time with a friend who had been dealing with a lot: loss of friends, loss of family, threats to his health. I believed he would come through it. I still believed in the practical, reassuring version of the story. But health is one of those things you do not notice until it starts negotiating with you.

Mortality has a way of clarifying people.

For some, it creates a list. Things to accomplish. Enemies to beat. Titles to earn. Companies to build. Numbers to hit. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Some people are genuinely powered by ascent.

But I have had enough death near me to know that my relationship with ambition is different.

I do not want to climb forever.

I do not want every version of my life to be a rung on somebody else’s ladder.

I do not want to confuse urgency with importance.

That can be a strange thing to admit in a culture that often treats peace as laziness and contentment as a lack of vision. Especially in professional spaces, where the approved story is always upward. Better title. Bigger salary. Larger team. More influence. More visibility. More everything.

But more is not a philosophy.

It is an appetite.

And appetites are not always wise.

I have been on and off professional networking sites more times than I can count. I understand why they exist. One never knows where the next job will come from. A friend of a friend. A former coworker. Someone who sees a post because another person liked it.

There is utility there.

There is also a cost.

Those places make it very easy to believe everyone else is becoming the official version of themselves while you are still trying to find the entrance. One person is made Director of Something. Another launches a company. Another buys a house. Another writes a humble paragraph about an enormous promotion. You scroll long enough and your life starts to look like a draft that missed its deadline.

I have lost opportunities because I did not perform hunger correctly.

I have answered compensation questions honestly and watched the temperature change. I once said that if I could make enough to pay my bills, attack my student loans, and have a little left over, I would be okay. That was not the answer some people wanted. They wanted to hear six figures, domination, a wolfish desire to crush the commission structure beneath my hooves.

Apparently, wanting enough can read as a lack of ambition.

I have also been asked where I see myself in five years.

It is an absurd question, though I understand why people ask it. Six months before COVID changed everything, plenty of people would have answered with confidence and been wrong by spring. Jobs disappeared. Plans collapsed. Entire industries froze. People found themselves out of work through no fault of their own, then had to explain the gap to systems that still preferred the fantasy of control.

So here is the honest answer:

In five years, I hope to be alive.

I hope the people I love are alive.

I hope I have work that pays what needs paying without hollowing me out completely.

I hope I have energy left at the end of the day for my wife, my dog, my health, my writing, and whatever version of myself is still trying to become more whole.

That is not the same as having no ambition.

I want to write great things.

I want to make films.

I want my work to reach people.

I want collaborators who sharpen me and audiences who feel less alone because of something I made. I want to build a body of work that proves I was here and paying attention.

But I do not want a life where the work costs me every other reason to live.

I am not here to become impressive at the expense of becoming absent.

I am not here to win a version of the game that requires me to hate my actual days.

After years of being at war with the world and with myself, what I want most is peace.

Not passivity.

Peace.

The kind that leaves room for discipline. The kind that makes creation possible. The kind that lets a person build without constantly bleeding into the foundation.

Maybe that is not the kind of ambition that looks best in a headline.

I can live with that.

I am not trying to become a headline.

I am trying to become a person I can live with.