AMBITION: My Problematic Fave

There is a phrase, often used on the social media website ‘tumblr’, when one refers to something as their ‘problematic fave’. This is when you like something a lot, but it has issues that distress you or you disagree with. This is what ambition is to me.

I’ve always been pretty ambitious in terms of what I would like to do or accomplish when I am older. Such ambitions include becoming an astronaut (every five year old child’s dream) and a postal worker (blame my childhood obsession with Postman Pat!). Ever since I really started to get into reading for pleasure though, all my ambition has been geared towards writing. Whether it’s through books, news articles, poetry, features, opinion pieces or reviews, I have spent the best part of the last nine years dreaming of sharing my thoughts and ideas with the rest of the world. My ambition to accomplish these things has made certain that I always have something that I am passionate about to work towards.

Unfortunately, nothing comes without caveats. The reason that ambition is problematic for me is that it requires effort. Many people will probably dismiss this issue as me being lazy, or the product of my generation – a group of young people that spends all their time hunched in front of a computer screen, in a darkened room, staring blankly at funny cat photos on the internet. This would be an incorrect assumption to make. Effort is, for most people, a very limited resource. One can only do so much before all they are physically capable of doing is hunching over a humorous cat photo filled screen. This a particular issue for my generation, as more is expected from young people, academically, than ever before. More and more children attend university than ever before (which is great – I love that there are more opportunities for people to learn about the things they are passionate about) which means that everything is more competitive. In order to enter into a field like journalism, one has to get a vast amount of experience in an industry where there is little room for the inexperienced to get any. This makes getting anywhere in the world of writing incredibly difficult due to the need to push one’s way into a system that is guarded by a force field built from multiple catch-22s.

The main reason why my ambition is to be a writer is because it is a broad enough field that I can incorporate most of the many things I have a passion for. The second major catch-22 that blocks me from achieving my goals is that in order to find time to improve my writing skills and gain experience, there is far less time available to spend on the things I actually want to write about: music, film and other forms of media that require one to sacrifice their time in order that they may be knowledgeable enough to give their opinion on.

At this point I have covered several things that contribute to my effort-o-metre. It has now reached a state where the effort levels are so high that the effort-o-metre has reached critical capacity. I have no energy left to write, listen to or play music, watch and analyse films or read enough to improve my writing, let alone work hard for my upcoming exams. This is where we come to the great the great thing about ‘problematic faves’, they’re important enough that when one’s effort-o-metre is full to bursting, there is still enough motivation left to put in that extra bit of effort even if you have none left.