“I’ve Lost My Ambition—And I’m Okay With It”

Amil Niazi bills her new memoir, Life After Ambition, as “good enough.” That’s the sentiment at the heart of the book—covering everything from the Canadian columnist’s youth in suburban B.C. to the myth of the millennial hustle grind to motherhood. In it, Niazi—best known for her parenting column “The Hard Part” for New York Magazine—re-evaluates, in an unflinching, deeply funny approach, how to live her life in a post-pandemic, post-ambition world. 

*

ON THE VERY last day of kindergarten, my son and I were standing near the schoolyard fence, lingering at pickup to say goodbye to all the other kids and parents. The warm June air was dusty, kids’ eager feet kicking up gravel and dirt from the playground as they raced home to start the summer. There had just been a graduation ceremony in the tiny kindergarten play yard, where confused little five-year-olds collected rolled-up paper diplomas and parents like me quietly wept over the unbearable passage of time and then apologized for being weird. Neither S nor I were in a rush to leave afterward as we talked about the end of his kindie days and what it would be like to move up to the big kids’ yard in the fall. He’d had a tough time adjusting to school, and with this new change looming I could see he was anxious about what to expect next. I took his hand to comfort him, secretly gleeful that it was still as soft and doughy as when he was a toddler, an age where hands and feet are more like paws, and slowly started to usher him home. Just as we were passing the slide, an older kid—a second grader—asked my son if he was excited about going into first grade.

“Well, don’t be,” she said before he had a chance to answer. “There’s a lot of homework, A LOT.” I wanted to laugh. How much homework could first graders really have? But my son didn’t seem to find any humour in her warning.

As we were walking home, he got really quiet. Then, suddenly, he burst into tears.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. He’s a sensitive guy, as prone to overthinking and worrying as I am, but this really seemed to come out of nowhere.

“I don’t want to just grow up, do work, and then die!” he said.

This time I did laugh. I couldn’t help myself. He just seemed so truly anguished by the prospect of first grade’s looming push into maturity.

I wondered if I should just tell him the truth, that that’s pretty much how it is for most of us, but the mom in me knew I should try and soften the blow a little.

I reassured him that he gets to be a kid, with few worries, for a very, very long time. Then, with less conviction, I told him that it’s really not so bad being a grown-up either.

In reality, I’ve shed a lot of tears over the same sentiment myself, oscillating between dreading the realities of work and adulthood and wanting nothing more than to just get on with it and get a regular job.

Growing up, I had to be ambitious. It was my only chance to escape the poverty and trauma that had shaped my own childhood. I knew if I wanted security and stability and comfort I had to work harder, be smarter, and strive, in the most active sense, to change my circumstances.

As a teen, I remember being told over and over again that hard work was the great equalizer, that if you studied hard enough and applied yourself, anything was possible, regardless of what you looked like or where you came from. It was a life vest, a necessary platitude, however empty, that I needed to cling to in order to feel like I could achieve more than my parents had.

In my 20s, disillusioned but still eager to prove myself, my ambition and desire for a certain kind of success collided with my relationships.

I was seen as somehow craven or a sellout for not only knowing what I wanted to do, but actually doing it. Men were condescending about how much effort I was putting in to get work, but if I got the job, they were quick to remind me that I only got it because of my identity. They made sure I knew I didn’t deserve any of it, that, even though they didn’t want what I had, if they did want it, they could certainly have it. I was loathsome for wanting success, and then mocked for getting it. I made myself smaller to correct the imbalance their behaviour suggested was there. But no matter how much I shrank, I still ended up paying a price for how much room I took up.

I learned to change my desires, the way I talked and the way I dressed. And I convinced myself that the further I climbed, the easier it would get, and eventually this would all be worth it.

*

THE ONLY THING that carried me through the tension and chaos at home and school as a teen was imagining myself somewhere else, imagining my life after this: living alone, working a stable job and answering only to myself, reliant only on me. I wanted to get out of there as quickly as I could, to have independence.

I started writing letters to myself as a way of ensuring that I got out. It was a way of creating a road map for my future, something tangible I could look to when I felt far away from my goals. Sealing them in envelopes I pocketed from school, I’d write, “Do NOT open until you’re 18,” on the front. Eighteen was the oldest age I could imagine myself turning, even as a teenager, so that version of me received all kinds of pleas and hopes and encouragements.

I wrote about the kind of person I hoped I’d become. I knew I wanted to be educated and secure in the world, walking around with the same confidence that my wealthy, white peers did. I wanted to live in a city, away from the stifling sameness of the suburbs.

“You have a great job writing for a magazine,” I wrote in one. “You live ALONE,” I declared in another. “You got out of here.” The life I demanded of my future self, the one I spent night after night imagining, was a promise to myself that not only did I deserve something better, but that it was within my reach.

Writing these pleas, imagining a different and better life, gave me something to cling to, a place to go in my mind when the stress of school and money and family became too much.

The message at home was the same many immigrants received. My parents wanted me to pursue something secure and honourable, rattling off a list of professions like a Richard Scarry book. “Be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer,” the mantra went. 

I indulged their doctor fantasy sometimes because I wanted affirmation that I was “good,” but the only thing I really liked doing, that I seemed to be good at, was writing. Even though I knew I wanted to write, that I often felt I had to write, I didn’t dare tell my parents that. In my letters I poured out my secret desires, my dreams for a life as a writer, but I knew my parents wouldn’t indulge this dream, and if I wanted to do it, I’d have to do it without their approval or support.

Only, dreaming it was harder than I thought. I wasn’t sure what it looked like to do what I wanted to do. I had no mentors or guidance. And the reality of my economic circumstances always pulsed in the background. I would never have a safety net to support me through these lofty goals. My dreams clashed with the desire and need to make money.

The cavalcade of shitty jobs began there and didn’t let up.

I can’t blame my parents (anymore) for not having the tools to help me navigate the system here. They were still trying to figure it out for themselves. Looking at some of my peers whose parents were writing their cover letters and college applications, I often wondered if I’d been locked out before I could even reach the door.

How much more could I have imagined for myself if my dreams weren’t contained by my lack of access to money? By language and race barriers?

When people started worrying about Y2K, whether we were all doomed, I wondered if that prophecy had been materialized all those years ago when they proclaimed us the generation of the future. Did they know that we’d end up bringing about the end of the world?

I secretly hoped the computers would reset everything. I wanted to start from scratch on a level playing field with everyone else. If all of those excited headlines from the last day of kindergarten were true, maybe we were the ones to usher in a new way of existing that shifted the scales of power, even a little.

There’s a great Haruki Murakami line from IQ84 where he writes about how many of us desire the end of the world. I certainly did.

My family wanted me to spend that New Year’s Eve at home, but I wanted to be somewhere else when the clock struck zero. What if my parents saw the disappointment in my face if nothing big happened and everything stayed the same? I watched the calendar flip at my friend Kristy’s grandparents’ house, a stockpile of toilet paper collected in their basement, just in case the computers shut down the Walmart. When nothing happened, I blew performatively on my noise maker and then asked Kristy’s mom if she could drive me home.

The millennium had come in with a whimper, that idea about the future that had seemed so galactic, so big that it was on the cover of all the newspapers, started to feel smaller than the world I already lived in.

When I got home, once everyone had gone to sleep, I opened the top drawer of my bedroom dresser and reached behind the shelf where I sometimes hid mickeys of vodka that Kristy and I would drink in the park between our houses. I kept the letters to myself hidden there, and I pulled all of them out.

I read them all, took careful note of the things I’d promised myself. I thought about how far away those dreams seemed from the life I was actually living. It seemed too painful to keep mementos of who I should be around, when I was barely able to sustain whatever version of myself I already was.

Then I carefully tore the letters up, one by one.

*

AMBITION BECOMES A funny thing when it’s blunted by inequality or used against you. It takes on a jagged shape, one that seems designed to maim anyone still hoping to grasp it. Yet for years I still tried to grab on, inching my way up and across different companies. I took “strategic” pay cuts and job titles that included a lot more work with no extra salary in the hope that ambition would somehow set me free, make all this striving worth something more than the carpal tunnel and student loan debt I’d accrued.

I seemed, so often, to be going in circles, watching people less capable than me get further up the ladder much quicker. I sat through countless interviews for promotions I was more than qualified for, only to hear, “We love you but . . . ,” then inevitably being asked to train the new hire to do the job I didn’t get.

When I got married and had a baby, a part of me was still trying to build my life around my job, still believing that the right job would make me happy, that not only could I do it all, but wanting anything less was a betrayal of myself. It took getting and quitting my dream job to finally make sense of what I actually wanted.

I’ve been liberated by my ambition, vilified for it, buried under it, and, finally, I’ve been freed from it.

Now I’m just trying to figure out what’s next.

Excerpted from Life After Ambition: A “Good Enough” Memoir by Amil Niazi. Copyright © 2026 Amil Niazi. Published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.