I recently caught up with a good friend who reminded me of a moment that feels super cringey to look back on (in this economy). It was early 2020, and we were having a spa day at a five-star hotel in London. I was on assignment to review the luxurious spa amenities — a fabulous perk from my erstwhile career as a travel editor at a national newspaper. Between an oxygen facial and saunters to the hydrotherapy pool, and perhaps intoxicated by the material pleasures around me, I boldly proclaimed: “I’m going to make six figures by the time I turn 30... watch me!”
For context, the average annual income of a journalist in the UK is £25,700 ($33,400) — a far cry from my goal amount. I was 27 years old, about to leave my charmed life as a journalist to work for a Fortune 500 company. Pivoting to corporate marketing meant a decent salary jump, but still nowhere near hitting my target.
Looking back on that dizzy declaration fills me with embarrassment. Not only have I changed, so too has the world as we know it: We are in year three of an ongoing global pandemic, forcing me, and millions of other millennials, to live out the end of my twenties in a limbo that resembles a hybrid of Groundhog Day and Black Mirror.
Instead of collecting core memories and embarking on new adventures, I was stuck doomscrolling and barred from seeing my family in China. This unspeakable pain was further exacerbated by a series of traumatic events at work that made me feel emotionally and intellectually unsafe as a woman of color, which took place during a surge of hate crimes committed against Asians living in the UK and America. All my energy went into surviving — pulling myself away from a cliff of anxiety, racial trauma and depression — rather than girlbossing (used here ironically, of course) my way up the corporate ladder.
So where does that leave me now, as the sun has begun to set on my twenties? I’ve decided to join "The Great Resignation," removing myself from a full-time career that no longer feels like a fit for my values. The next few months will be spent making the long overdue journey back to my hometown, Macau, and reclaiming my precious time for fun things I’ve always wanted to do: document my grandma’s family recipes, grow my TikTok following, or perhaps become a paid extra on the next season of Bridgerton.
After the lull that was the last two years, ambition means something entirely different to me now. It means having the financial freedom and stability to focus on pursuits that make my heart sing. I would still like to make a boatload of money someday (I mean, who doesn’t?) — and I have confidence that I will — but for now, I am choosing to live for my creative self. So I want to ask Amanda, Alice and Mary Frances: Has the pandemic forced you to reassess your relationship with work and ambition? VW
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Venus asks: Has the pandemic forced you to reassess your relationship with work and ambition?
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In the words of...
Amanda
If the pandemic had an impact on my relationship with work and ambition, it’s that I’ve zoomed out a bit, widening the scope of my perspective on success. Maybe too much time spent in an apartment that seemed to be getting smaller each day got me thinking bigger — thinking beyond the bylines that have always been my metric for success.
It’s not how much I work or what I’m working on that has changed over the past two years, it’s the way that work factors into a more nuanced definition of accomplishment. I’ve opened my eyes to all the other good stuff that’s worth celebrating as a job well done, like the tremendous effort that goes into building and preserving a life outside of my profession that I’m grateful for, and nourishing relationships with the people at the center of that gratitude. I recognize that my ability to now embrace the intensity of my emotions, to confront and listen to them, to surrender any illusions of control in order to work with them, is an accomplishment too.
As a writer, this has meant leaning into the stuff that scares me and trusting that the discomfort is a sign of personal evolution. Because success is growth. Success is learning, and for me, it's doing so unselfishly. That's why I tell stories — to share what I learn. I endeavor to keep telling stories, and to find new ways to get them out into the world, which has led me to lecturing and longer-form writing. Both of which are nerve-wracking, both of which terrify and delight me because they push me outside of my comfort zone, where I’m much more likely to fail.
Perhaps the relationship that’s changed the most for me is the one I have with failure, which I no longer equate with rejection. I like the idea that rejection isn’t rejection at all, it’s actually redirection. My willingness to embrace these diversions, enduring the inevitable bumps along the way, is how I measure my own ambition. So onwards I go. AR
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In the words of...
Alice
In some bizarre universe where all my former employers get together to discuss my relative merits as a newspaper boy, shop assistant, bartender and waiter, they’d all agree on one thing: I am lazy. Lazy is a word that has cropped up over the years but I’ve never taken it to heart, because obviously I disagree. I’m efficient. I don’t like to work for the sake of it. Why is it that when you’re on the shop floor sans customer, and all the stock is organized and the admin has been filed and the shelves have been dusted and the windows washed and the brass polished, do you have to keep making up tasks to look like you’re busy? As long as they are alert enough to pour a glass of wine when the time comes, who cares whether a minimum-wage worker is sitting down while no one’s looking?
As far as ambition goes, I am a sort of realist bon vivant: If I have to work to pay for my delights, I may as well do something that delights me. But over the years working towards turning my passion into my profession, I have also learned to strike a healthy lazy-efficient balance: Give me the deadline and ye shall have your press release filed on time. It shouldn’t matter that I only started working on it three hours before it was due (or that I paused to play Wordle), as long as I got it done. I do take pride in my work, but I’ve done the whole frenzied-replying-to-emails-at-10pm-on-a-Sunday thing and it’s utterly draining. So I take pride in switching off, too.
The only tangible way Covid has affected my plans is that in early 2020 I put on three comedy shows and considered moving towards producing more live events — you can guess the punchline. It was such a loose idea, a shift from extra-curricular writing to extra-curricular hosting, that its quashing was barely perceptible. Besides, there’s no reason I can’t give it another go in the future.
To me, the pandemic doesn’t have an imposing, monolithic quality. As Venus points out, we’re still in the midst of it. It is amorphous, taking us from lockdown panic to vaccine panic to nobody panic to COMPLETE AND UTTER PANIC. Having been an established freelancer since long before we knew what WFH stood for (What Fresh Hell, perhaps?), I’m remarkably unscathed by the past two years, which I know is a rarity. I may not have paid holidays or company health insurance, but I also don’t have a horrendous wake-up alarm. I’m thrilled for all the others who have decided to follow suit, drop out of the rat race and embrace what employers may call laziness, but I just call life. AB
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In the words of...
Mary Frances
I’ve never been a very competitive person. Once, during an especially close pole vaulting competition in high school, my coach went on a long Are you going to let her beat you? speech. “Why would that be so bad?” I thought. “Besides, we’re 15.” It was one of the first times I can remember feeling embarrassed by, and for, an adult.
Having a “meh, why not” personality has mostly served me well over the years; It’s helped resolve other people’s fights over bunk beds at camp and made me a solid plus-one at weddings, as well as an easy-going coworker, per performance reviews. I care about the quality of my writing, but I’ve rarely framed it in the larger context of a specific career arch. That long-game vision has just never been there.
The older I get, the more I’ve realized I need to make sure this attitude doesn’t get misconstrued for indifference — or worse yet, form a habit of building tepid relationships. The “anything goes” mantra isn’t immune to drama, however carefree it feels in the moment. Nor can people in the bleachers at the track meet see inside my Care Bear brain and think, “Oh, how nice. That awkward teen with the forehead acne wants everyone to win.” They only know what they can see: That one person delivered, and another did not.
When the pandemic hit, a lot of people I know in media slowed down, and started prioritizing life outside of work for the first time. As a serial WFH permalancer, 2020 was when I realized that getting more all of the things I loved — family, friends, travel, art — was not only related to shifting more of my priorities to work, but hinged on its growth. I went full-time, for the first time, at a large company. I signed my first lease. I still believe that work should be structured to fit into life, and not the other way around, but I appreciate the cosmic humor of finding more reasons to love ambition, from the stability it can create to the character it builds. MFK
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