[Music] Imagine you have a dream you're striving to achieve. You're working hard, perhaps for years or decades. You've made sacrifices to get to where you are, and now you finally have your shot at really making it happen. We're going to get a star. But what if, as you get closer to your goal, your ambition shifts from a source of motivation to something more tormenting? You're finally getting to do what you wanted to do, but you find it difficult to even enjoy that thing while you do it. This, by all appearances, is K's reality in the FX show The Bear. For him, every success seems quickly overshadowed by the next thing he needs to do, the next improvement he needs to make to really get to where he wants to go. In chasing his dream, he's paying a steep price. He's chronically stressed. He's blowing up at the people around him. He ends up pushing one of the real sources of happiness in his life away because he thinks she's getting in the way of his

goal, and he alienates the very people who are helping him get to where he wants to go. But it seems like he can feel it. He's almost there. He can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe he hopes he'll finally have a sense of satisfaction, peace, and happiness once he has those Michelin stars within his grasp. How often do we find ourselves like Ki, so lost in the pursuit of success or self-improvement that we're unable to enjoy the journey? Or you've dedicated so much time to achieving that goal that you're no longer able to enjoy any other part of your life. Car's experience with ambition is a theme we've seen explored in the movies countless times, whether it's the tension between ambition and relationships in La La Land and Whiplash, or the psychological cost of relentlessly pursuing artistic perfection in Black Swan. Cinema is packed full of stories about the cost of ambition, like we see in The Social Network, There Will Be Blood, and The Godfather, in Oppenheimer.

we see a man who's haunted by the result of his ambition. The Wolf of Wall Street shows us a society that rewards the ambitious, regardless of whether they lie, cheat, or steal to gain their success. Citizen Kane explores a character who finds emptiness on the other side of success. These are just a few examples in a sea of stories that either celebrate ambitious characters or warn of ambitious pitfalls. And I think it totally makes sense that this is a common theme. The tension between what we want in life and what we might have to sacrifice to get that is a central conflict in many of our lives, so it makes sense that we're drawn to big romantic cinematic portrayals of that conflict. But I do wonder if, in the midst of Hollywood and American films' obsession with ambition and ambitious characters, we're missing something. Like, we're skeptical of ambition in our stories, but that skepticism is only about how ambition is directed and used, whether we're celebrating the positive of ambition or warning against its

potential dangers and pitfalls. The presumption seems to almost always be that the protagonist will be ambitious. What would it look like if we told the story of a life not defined by the relentless pursuit of ambition? Have you ever noticed the beautiful shifting pattern that is created by sunlight streaming through trees? It shimmers and dances almost like water, but in its own unique way. It's sometimes only there for a fleeting moment, and it can turn a dead log or plain wall into an impressionist painting unique to that moment, created by the relationship between the sunlight, trees, and wind. The Japanese word for this is kevi, a word without a direct English equivalent that encompasses not just the phenomena itself but also the feeling associated with appreciating it. It is this pattern of light that's often noticed by Hirama, the protagonist of Vim Vendor's 2023 film about a toilet cleaner in Tokyo. Amidst a cinematic landscape dominated by ambitious pursuits, Perfect Day sits in quiet contrast to most other stories that examine

ambition. The film follows Hiyama as he goes through his daily routine. We watch as he gets ready for his day, listens to music as he drives to work, methodically cleans the beautiful toilets around Tokyo, is helpful when the opportunity arises, takes care of himself and his trees, reads and dreams. Other things happen, but the repetition of this life is the core of the film. It's an entirely unambitious character living a contented and happy life in a movie that is beautiful, peaceful, and calm. And yet, this is not the kind of story we gravitate towards. For Carme, it's not just what he's running towards that motivates his unrelenting drive; it's what he's running from. Because we had this connection through food, and he had made me feel so rejected and lame and shitty and uncool. I made this plan where I was going to go work in all the best restaurants in the world. Sometimes ambition can arise out of just a desire to make the world a

better place, accomplish what we can, and live a full life. If this is the root of our ambition and we understand and weigh the cost of pursuing that ambition, then I think it can serve us well. But where I think ambition can really become a trap is when it arises out of a desire to prove our worth because we feel unworthy and unlovable unless we earn it, or if our ambition is driven by a desire to escape from a current existence that might feel too emotionally or physically painful to bear. Or in our modern world, where we're more alienated from traditional sources of meaning like religion and community, I think visible external success can become a way that people try to live a meaningful life. In this way, ambition seems to offer us so much, but as our stories show, it can also come with a hefty price tag. If we're going to pay that price, we want to be sure that it's actually going to pay off. What about the people for whom the cost is not worth it, or the people who lead

lives that society deems not successful and then carry a sense of shame for not ever accomplishing more. What if you reach the light at the end of the tunnel and then instead of finding what you had hoped the success would provide, you find yourself emotionally right back where you started? There are, of course, many successful people who are content with where they are, but I think the number of stories about the cost and price of ambition that are often made by successful artists within our society also speak to very real experiences. And I think there are many people who haven't yet achieved success who wonder if the path they're on towards what culture has defined as successful is really going to be worth it. But if you find yourself skeptical of ambition, you might find yourself looking around and wondering if there's even another path to take. What does the alternative even look like? The movie is titled Perfect Days, which implies Hiyama is living a good life despite its simplicity and his lack of what is typically seen as success at

one point he encounters his a strange sister. She pulls up in an expensive car with a driver. She comes from a totally different world, the world of success. Seeing where he lives, she asks out of a sense of concern and maybe even disdain if he's really cleaning toilets. Yet he seems to me watching the movie largely happy, content with his simple life in a way that many people more successful than him struggle to be. It's not just movies or television that are obsessed with ambition. Recently, I went on the App Store to download an app and was greeted with a page of ways I can optimize my downtime. Even a relaxation time is often perceived as valuable only because it recharges us for more important things or is time we can use to practice skills for self-improvement. And then on social media, you can be fed a constant stream of how to be better, how to be more fit, look more beautiful, make more money. The list goes on and on. And even if the content isn't telling you what's wrong

with you and how to be better. You're often seeing a constant stream of people who look and seem like they're living better lives. The important critique here is not the validity of these individual pieces of content or any of these stories about ambition. We can separate that individual experience of a single piece out from the overwhelming total experience of all of this content together. And when you look at it that way, you have to wonder what's missing from that image. One day, Hiyama's niece shows up unexpectedly. She's run away from her mother, the successful mother who is a part of a different world. They go on a bike ride together, and stopping on a bridge, Nico asks if the river runs into the ocean here. Hiyama gently guides her attention away from the next best thing towards fully appreciating where they are right now in the present moment. There's nothing wrong with wanting to visit the ocean, but if our minds are always stuck where they could be, we miss out on being where we are. I think this movie struck me so profoundly.

because in this small gentle moment, it encapsulated one of the most difficult but important lessons I've had to learn in my adult life. Did you know when you were there that it was special? I don't know. I think I was uh, I was always too busy to um, to know all the time. When we're present, we notice smaller subtly beautiful details that can be really easy to overlook. Watching a movie like Perfect Days is itself a kind of practice in this. It often finds beautiful compositions in the designs of the toilets or in Tokyo's tangle of buildings and streets. It slows down and kind of asks you as the viewer to appreciate the beauty of the mundane world as Hiyama does. I think a lot of people find this kind of thing boring, and it's not often I'm in a headspace to really fully enjoy and appreciate a movie like this, but that's kind of part of the point. Hiyama finds contentment and satisfaction in a life that many of us would think is

boring, but maybe the vilification of boredom is part of what keeps us trapped in an endless cycle of constantly trying to get to somewhere else. Renew via Anan says kbby nicely highlights the point that very often in our mindless pursuit of the light at the end of the tunnel, we fail to recognize the many little beams of light that have already passed. Passed by being present in the moment like this is sometimes talked about as mindfulness, an idea which itself has been app-ified, commodified, and sold to us as a way to make ourselves more focused and to be more productive. But according to Dr. John Kabat-Zinn, one of the leaders in research on the benefits that mindfulness can have for our health and well-being, you might think of mindfulness simply as the art of conscious living. Sitting down to meditate is one way we can teach ourselves to be more mindful and present, but being able to sit and meditate is not itself the goal. I have to remind myself to breathe sometimes. I um, I have to remind myself.

to uh to be present. You know, why is it so hard to be present? Partly because I think it doesn't magically make us feel better. John Kabat-Zinn says mindfulness is not a cure-all solution. While it can help, being present doesn't eliminate pain, annoyance, awkwardness, or sorrow. Perfect Days shows Hiyama facing all of these things. Like Ki, he has a painful familial history, and his presence doesn't immediately heal all of those wounds. But being present does allow you to detach your sense of value and joy from some hypothetical future and actually experience it now. The difficulty of doing that is that in order to do that, you just also have to be present with any pain or discomfort that you're experiencing right now. You good? Yeah, I'm going to crack it eventually. I didn't mean the plate. I think ambition can be this trap because it can entice us with this idea of perfect freedom from our stress, pain, and sadness someday out there in the future once we've done all the work and accomplished our goals. Every pain we

experience. Now we see as just a reason to push harder to get there. It traps us into putting all our energy into reaching a hypothetical future while we dissociate from the work that needs to be done right now in the present to truly heal and the things about the present that we could enjoy. There's another moment where Hirama's niece sees a girl being rude to him. Nico looks to his face in sadness, perhaps expecting him to be hurt or offended. He seems to realize what she's thinking and smiles. It's as if he's saying the lack of recognition from others is embarrassing for them, not me. Her concern turns into a smile, and we see that his peace is not so easily disturbed by an outside force that he doesn't control. This woman's act of negativity instead of spreading outward to Hirama and his niece stops with him. Instead of finding the imperfections in life as reasons to strive to be somewhere else or to be someone else, he finds them as opportunities for

Simplicity, humility, solitude, contentment, and slowing down to appreciate the elegant beauty that life hides in all its little corners and crevices. I think there's this profound sense of loss that comes with feeling like our value as a person is attached to whether or not we can succeed within an unfair capitalist system that we don't control. Some people respond to this system's unfairness by fighting even harder to achieve success within its confines. Some people fight to dismantle it, and I think those are valid paths to pursue. But I think it's also deeply radical to do the work of finding your sense of success and self-worth independent of an external system entirely. I don't think the philosophy presented in perfect days is trying to minimize the struggle of those who work incredibly hard just to survive what life has thrown at them. I don't think it's saying that the solution to every problem is simple acceptance or that we shouldn't strive to make the world more just and fair, but

I think it does suggest that acceptance and presence make life's inevitable struggles more tolerable. And for some of us, it's worth asking ourselves if we are like Ki, feeling like we're stuck trying to survive when really we're just trying to get to the next rung on the ladder, or are desperately clinging to what we've already achieved. I think it's also important to note that this doesn't mean living mindfully is passive resignation. Here, Yama firmly and calmly stands up for himself when he's overworked by his boss. Mindfulness is not resigning yourself to a feeling of worthlessness; instead, it's a heartfelt affirmation of the worth of even the small moments in life. Paradoxically, it's probably one of the harder paths to pursue. While hustle, beauty, and health culture challenge us to wake up earlier, work out more, be more productive, or invest more, you might find that just sitting down for 20 minutes to be with yourself and do nothing is more difficult than any of those things. And finally, I don't think being more present requires renouncing.

all your ambitions and dreams suddenly thinking you'll go off and live a perfect monk-like life of asceticism and presence is just another kind of ambitious perfectionism in the bear a successful chef that Ki idolizes is one of the most present and grounded people in the entire show so why do you do this I do for a living no but like don't you have stes that do this I think time spent doing this is time well spent time well spent that's what it's all about yeah I think so being more mindful in the pursuit of your dreams might even help you accomplish them and if it doesn't it'll probably at least give you a more accurate view of your actual wants and desires I I want to sleep in more uhuh want to go to London more want to go to a party I want to meet people live precisely Cary believes it's his intense singular focus that drives his success but how does he know that's really true being present we might notice that what we really want isn't

another big accomplishment, but some rest. That maybe what we need is not a distraction from our emotions but an outlet for them. That maybe what we need is not external validation but to do the work of learning how to quiet the mean self-critical voice inside our head. You know, maybe if I could provide more, more, more amusement or enjoyment for myself, it would be easier to provide for others. You know, I think you probably could accomplish a lot more than you think you could if you had confidence in yourself. And that's the message that we get from many of our inspiring stories about ambition. But if you don't end up accomplishing those dreams, or if you don't want to be great or ambitious, that's okay too. A movie like Perfect Days, I think, helps remind us that our true worth and value and ability to live a meaningful, contented life does not have to depend on what we accomplish in the eyes of the system or others. I think Hirama's quiet contentment offers a valuable alternative.

perspective on what it means to live a fulfilling life. Here, our protagonist isn't triumphing over hardship and pain once and for all, but is taking it all as it comes with grace and equanimity. Perfect days, of course, isn't the only movie that centers around an unambitious character; it's just my favorite recent example. My Patreon film club and I recently had a discussion about the role ambition plays in movies and our favorite examples of movies that don't center around ambition or ambitious characters. It's interesting to think about how ambitious characters are often attached to traditional film story structure, and so a lot of movies that deal with unambitious characters have a non-traditional structure or operate in a specific genre like romance or horror. But of course, there are always exceptions. Our art, media, and stories can enrich our lives, inspire us, and give us a deeper understanding of the world, but I think good media literacy involves being aware of the accumulative effect of all the narratives we're consuming and the blind spots within those.

narratives. The simple day-to-day activities that make up anybody's life are not treated as cinematic, except in rare exceptions like perfect days. Our social media feeds tend to be filled with people that are, by definition, exceptional. If we let our media define our sense of value, we can end up feeling like our day-to-day life is insignificant. But I think it's the things in our lives that usually aren't shown on the screens where we actually stand to find the most meaning. Every second counts. Next time is next time. Now is now. If you want to catch perfect days and you haven't yet, it's available outside the US in many countries on Movie, my sponsor for this video. You can sign up for a 30-day extended free trial at Movie.com/thomasl. What I really love about Movie as a streaming service is its focus on curation. This isn't just a rotation of popular hits like you get on Netflix. Every film on Movie is hand-chosen by somebody because they think it's an interesting film. They also

produce and distribute really interesting work that you can't find anywhere else. One of their films coming up is My First Film by Zia Anger. This is a movie about the difficulty of filmmaking. It fictionalizes and dramatizes Zia Anger's own experience making a failed feature film, intertwining it with themes of her own life and the experience of pregnancy. This movie has one of the best depictions of ultra-low-budget indie filmmaking that I think I've ever seen. Ambition, of course, is a theme here because making a movie is inherently an ambitious endeavor. It's out on September 6th, so sign up for movieatm.com/thomasl to check that out for free and to explore the rest of their library. Another movie that doesn't have ambition as its central drive is Richard Linklater's Boyhood, another favorite of mine, and you can watch that right now on movie in the US. Go check it all out, click the link on the screen or down in the description below. That's movie.com.

Thomas flight. Thanks again to the movie for sponsoring this video, and thanks so much to my patrons for their support. If you want to join the film club or get access to my monthly review video of everything that I watch, go to patreon.com/Thomas flight.

Hollywood's Obsession with Ambition

Exploring the artistry behind the visual media landscape that surround us. 

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