Welcome to another week of life on the road. I’m Genie Leslie, a freelance writer working remotely and traveling the country with my husband.
This week, we’re in Philadelphia, which, I’m embarrassed to say, is much bigger than I realized. We’re relieved to have more space in our Airbnb again, and we’re learning how to grocery shop in small, frequent walking trips.
I have never felt less ambitious at work than I do right now.
Don’t get me wrong; I don’t mean that I’m not enjoying my job, or that I’m not doing it well, or that I’m “quiet quitting” or whatever the trendiest term is at the moment.
I just mean that, right now, my job has a purpose, and that purpose is not climbing the corporate ladder or extensively expanding my skills as a copywriter or providing me with creative and soulful fulfillment. My job’s purpose is to pay my bills without stressing me out or bleeding into my free time, while spending my work time with thoughtful, non-toxic people.
And it’s fulfilling this purpose beautifully.
A few years ago, this is a statement I would’ve been embarrassed to make publicly. As a millennial, for years I felt the pressure to make my job my life’s purpose. If I could just find that exact right job that paid me enough money to not only survive but thrive while also providing me with all the enrichment and contentment of a creative passion and even introducing me to my future-best friends, then I would be happy. Then I would have succeeded.
Well. That’s a tall order. In fact, a nearly impossible one. And one that I’m not even sure is worth pursuing.
Because what the last few years have shown me—not just our traveling year but the pandemic/lockdown years before that—is that focusing only on career ambition leaves a lot of the other areas in life lacking and neglected.
I was already thinking about this by the time we traveled. It’s partly the reason that I was able to even consider re-homing Darcy so we could see the country. I knew that I missed family, that I missed travel, that I wanted to get out into the world and do more, and I couldn’t have that without adjusting somewhere else.
But recently, Anne Helen Petersen’s been writing about this in her newsletter and talking about this in her podcast in a way that really resonates with me. Because she’s been talking about reframing how we think of ambition.
When we talk about someone being ambitious, we’re usually referring to their career goals. A person with a singular goal who’s on a path and doing everything they can to make it to the end of that path.
But what if you don’t have that career goal? What if you used to be chasing a singular goal, only to achieve it and realize you don’t even want it anymore? What if you never found a specific career that you wanted to chase with the cheerfully focused drive of Elle Woods becoming a lawyer?
What if the world shut down and you were trapped in a small townhouse with your husband and a terrified dog, and suddenly ambitious goals in the worlds of advertising or screenwriting seemed totally silly and trivial in comparison to the world falling apart?
In our culture, it can be easy to feel like you’ve done something wrong in these situations.
But ambition, AHP notes, does not have to apply only to work. Ambition can apply to anything.
You can be ambitious in your garden. You can be ambitious in your reading habits. Maybe you’re ambitious when it comes to a sport, or to baking, or to healing work in therapy. Maybe your ambition is focused on raising your children, or tending your plants, or learning to dance.
(She also discusses the fact that, no, you also don’t have to be ambitious in anything at all if you don’t want to or can’t. You can, in fact, just be, something that’s still so hard for our productivity-minded culture to grasp.)
Hearing ambition framed in this way really opened up a new way for me to think about it. Instead of thinking of ambition as this thing, this drive, that I’m supposed to have in one arena, now I’m thinking of it like a soundboard.
Go with me on this. A soundboard has many sliders, so that you can mix a song to the perfect balance. Push the vocals up, pull the drums down, push the bass up, push the drums back up a tad, pull the trumpet down. A good song is never going to have all the sliders all the way up or all the way down. (I’m not a sound designer but I do think this is the general idea.)
Think of your ambition like a soundboard for everything in your life. For me, one slider is for work, sure. But just one. There’s another slider for writing this Substack. And another for screenwriting. There’s one for my relationship with Aaron, one for my family, one for my friends, one for travel, one for meeting new people (consistently on the low side, thank you introversion). There’s a slider for exercise and a slider for baking.
There have been times recently when I’ve felt guilty for not being ambitious at work. There have been times when I’ve heard of a new full-time work opportunity at a company, and I briefly wondered if I should chase that job before remembering all the reasons that I prefer freelancing right now. I kept wondering if I should be chasing down those opportunities or promotions.
But when I think about it in terms of the soundboard, it makes perfect sense. Right now, my life is very ambitious around travel. That slider is way up. And right up there with it is the “trying new hobbies” slider that pushes me to kayak and rock climb. My relationship with Aaron slider is pretty high, considering we are with each other 99.9% of the time and working very hard to make sure that doesn’t lead to us killing each other.
So of course, all the other sliders can’t be up at the same intensity. I can’t be, and I don’t want to be, ambitious about everything all the time. I need some things in my life to be steady and predictable so that other things can be much more exciting and unpredictable.
When I know that everything can’t be up at the same time, I’m able to go easier on myself. I look back at myself in 2021, working from home and overwhelmed with my anxious dog, and I can see that I was simply doing too much. My dog training slider was all the way up. I was trying to be perfect as a dog guardian in a situation where it was all but impossible. While also starting a freelance business and writing a new script and exercising 5 days a week and baking goodies regularly. I had all the sliders all the way up and it wasn’t sustainable. I look back at that time and instead of thinking, “I failed our dog” or “I should’ve written more,” I instead see “I was burning myself out” and “Something had to give to allow for balance.”
Something had to give. It always does.
Some day, when we settle somewhere for a while, I’ll adjust my ambition again. When travel inevitably slows down, something else will pop up to fill its place. Maybe it will be work or maybe it will be screenwriting. Maybe it will be dog fostering and training. Maybe it will be something I don’t even know about yet.
The whole time I’ve been writing this essay, one memory keeps popping up in my mind.
I was maybe 22 years old, at my mom’s house talking to my Aunt Genie (yes, I’m named for her). I had a job in publishing, surely a stepping stone to my eventual dream job, and I think I was talking about the fact that the job was, in fact, sometimes boring and tedious. And that I wanted to find that right job that was fun.
“Fun? Why does work need to be fun?” she asked me.
I thought this was a ridiculous question. I didn’t know how to respond because the very premise seemed ludicrous to me. So she continued.
“Fulfilling, maybe. Challenging and interesting, maybe. But I don’t think work needs to be fun.”
To be quite honest, at the time, I thought she was being such a party pooper. Work was supposed to be fun, because work was supposed to be what you loved doing. It was supposed to be everything. If she didn’t realize this, maybe she’d had a sad relationship with her own work.
Now, at 35, I tip my hat to Aunt Genie. She was ahead of me, and of Anne Helen Petersen’s work, and of the whole millennial generation with our confused relationships to our jobs. She got it. And now I do, too.
I don’t need work to be fun. And I don’t need work to be everything, the be all, end all. I just need it to be one piece of many in building a life I enjoy.
What else is going on?
The drive from Philadelphia to Charleston was longer than we’d realized, so we decided to get a head start on Friday and stop in Wilmington, North Carolina for the night. It was supposed to cut 3 hours off of a 10 hour drive, but I think it ended up being at least an hour out of the way. So Saturday was still a long driving day, but we made it.
Once again, I’m learning so much more about geography than I ever learned in school. If you’d asked me last week which states we’d drive through to get to Philadelphia, I certainly wouldn’t have said Maryland or Delaware. (This northeastern part of the country has always been a big blog in my mind, with very little distinction between states.) But we did drive through Maryland and Delaware, and they were very pretty states, at least from my passenger-seat viewpoint on the highway.
If you enjoy the Bridgerton series on Netflix, I recommend Queen Charlotte. It’s a one-off season, a prequel for the queen character (I keep thinking of it as a Bridgerton side quest), and honestly, I enjoyed it so much more than I expected to.
Go see the movie Past Lives. Just do it. It’s so beautiful.