Why is there not more ambition in the developed world?
Maybe there is just as much ambition as there ever was. Maybe people have just shifted their goals. Maybe they have different drives. Instead of aspiring to be the next Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, maybe people have realised that this is not really what they want in life. Instead of having a strong desire for financial and business success, maybe people in the developed world have started to shift their focus to other things like friendship, family, enjoying life, and learning to be satisfied with less. Maybe in this new world we live in to be ambitious means something else. I don’t know.
I had a similar thought reading this, and I looked up ambition to check myself. ‘The desire to achieve fame, rank or power.’ You raise a good question: does power lie in solely material gain? Of course not, more and more people understand that controlling one’s own attention and time _is_ the material gain we seek. The equation is changing (has been for years, accelerated by the pandemic), not just in ‘the developed world’.
Aside: Still waking up and chewing on why the developed world is called out specifically as a thing in this question. Where does the developed world end and the undeveloped world begin?
Maybe there is just as much ambition as there ever was. Maybe people have just shifted their goals. Maybe they have different drives. Instead of aspiring to be the next Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, maybe people have realised that this is not really what they want in life. Instead of having a strong desire for financial and business success, maybe people in the developed world have started to shift their focus to other things like friendship, family, enjoying life, and learning to be satisfied with less. Maybe in this new world we live in to be ambitious means something else. I don’t know.