A paradigm shift: am I not ambitious enough?

Two years into this post-career life, a reflection on privilege, growth, and ambition.

Oct 29, 2025

This world is not an easy place to exist, let alone thrive.

I find myself caught in an uneasy space between finally settling into contentment in this post-career life and wrestling with a looming dread for my children’s futures and well-being. Last month, I fended off a tearful anxiety attack; this month, I’ve managed to coax the existential dread into stillness before it dragged me under.

I remember my mother telling me years ago that she couldn’t bear to see us struggle while she finally enjoyed a measure of financial freedom she had worked so hard to achieve. Funny how I can relate to this now. Generational wealth is as varied as saving your children from oppression to lifting them up from a life of poverty. My mother accomplished both.

But take a wide angle view and what you’ll see is that past generations have always taken what they’ve needed in a short-sighted vision towards what they leave behind for future generations. This is how the US is currently governed. Our national debt is soaring in order to fund tax cuts and the expansion of nonsense agencies like ICE. The theatrics of the DOGE days and the hunt for wasteful government spending feels like years ago at this point.

Now that my career days are behind me, my anxiety about jobs seems to have transferred over to my college children’s prospects. As I enjoy a life free from office politics, creative egos, and the relentless ruse of productivity-as-self-worth, I get the same pit-in-the-stomach feeling that I had when job hunting, knowing that my kids have their entire working lives in front of them. What is a job anymore in this day and age of AI, offshoring, and profits over people?

It’s irrational, but I feel a tinge of guilt for this slower life that I now enjoy. I also feel an uncomfortable privilege when asked by people I meet: what do you do?

self portrait through a reflection — So much reflecting when you end a career

But first, there’s something I feel the need to address: I do not take this privilege of not needing to work full time anymore lightly, even if it’s equal parts what I’ve decided was a necessity to prioritize my physical health and wanting to remove myself from the toxicity and AI takeover that is the tech and corporate world. Our household income just gets us by. Healthcare is our main albatross, as it is for many Americans, but I have options now because of a spouse who has a job that provides our health insurance. Like many people over fifty, he’s also hanging on to his job for dear life.

It wasn’t always this way. I was always the breadwinner who carried that responsibility, so I don’t take this for granted.

I also straddle the line between being a minority but not being a marginalized person who is considered underrepresented. I’ve experienced in the past when people—even among those close to me—didn’t consider me a person of color because of perceived “success.” My mother always told me ever since I was a child that I would need to work twice as hard in this country to succeed as an immigrant, especially as a girl. That the model minority label would cling like a leech and follow me everywhere. She was right.

White adjacency puts me firmly in this perceived position of being able to sail through this system where I benefit from white privilege. I’m even hesitant to type out these words because this isn’t an essay about race or the black-white binary where people like me often feel invisible. But it is related to feeling very much like a privileged jerk every time I’m asked, where do you work? what do you do?

Two years later and I still don’t know how to answer this question.

When my youngest was five, she looked me in the eye and said, “I don’t want to be you when I grow up.”

She was referring to her observation that I was always working. It’s a funny, if not very self-aware and unintentionally insightful, thing for a kid to say. Our kids are not us, nor should they be. I think about her declaration as I get caught up in the hyper competitive rat-race for internships and school clubs. The culture on college campuses mirror the outside world. I need to question whether I want that indoctrination for my kids, the one that I sometimes nudge them towards because job hunting feels like shouting into the void.

The paradox is that my ability to retire from a career much earlier than I ever expected is because my entire identity embodied toxic productivity. Having one job was never enough security. I added another, and often a third for fear of not being able to provide for my family. For much of their childhood, I lived on adrenaline and fear. Frugality was not a game but a religion. And then along the way, I taught myself how to invest.

This knowledge is the generational wealth that I’m passing down to my kids with a starter investment account that I’ve opened with their summer job earnings. Privately, I’m proud of what we’ve built; I feel that I’ve earned this break—but—I still feel like a privileged jerk if I say this out loud.

When we live in a culture that glorifies measurable output and hustle culture, it isn’t surprising to see how long it takes to untangle oneself from that mindset. I used to get high on my ability to efficiently optimize every minute of my time. It’s taken years to reverse that thinking and be ok with doing nothing. Letting go of career ambitions was incredibly freeing, even if my ego still feels fragile about it.

But now I wonder, have I gone too far the other way?

I have friends in their post-career lives who have clear ambitions of turning their passions into a second career. Others crave legitimizing their art by seeking gallery shows and getting published. A goal-oriented person who suddenly has no career goals feels a bit like a lost soul, but weirdly, at this point in time, I have no such desires. No desire to submit my writing anywhere, no burning desire to show my art in public. I’m not even sure I care if this newsletter grows.

I read a lot of very valid and justified complaints about Substack growth flatlining, presumably because this platform is pushing creators to use Notes to grow their readership. I can easily get caught up in the noise. But then I have to ask myself, why?

Why do I want my readership to grow? Why is that important? I have no delusions of making a living wage from this newsletter, no plans to write a book or start another business. When I ask myself why, I can’t come up with a good answer.

But I think this is the crux to my aversion: as soon as these thoughts creep in about reaching higher, a hobby starts to feel like a business. The hustle mentality kicks in. The cycle of self-promotion restarts. Stats become a proxy for my self worth, and the chase for more views and likes becomes addictive. In my post-career life, why would I want to go back to the grind?

We’re conditioned to want growth because everything we’re fed points to it as a measure of success. Everyone’s chasing it, everyone posts about it, and algorithms reward it. More followers, more subscribers, more, more, more. But once you’re intrenched on this path, more never becomes enough. So ask yourself this: will having more readers make you feel more like a writer?

And now, a little Halloween

Some photos that have nothing to do with this essay. Halloween in Brooklyn is my favorite time of year. I am always so impressed with the creativity!

Some links for you

To read:

People are having fewer kids. Their choice is transforming the world's economy (npr)
“We seem to be kind of watching a science fiction novel,” said Nicholas Eberstadt, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute. “Turning the population pyramid upside down basically upsets the business model, the background music, that we’ve had in modern life for as long as we can remember.”
As the population ages, we’re in for some serious demographic challenges. My kids are everything to me, but I totally understand why some people choose to be child-less.
Why Do We Travel? To Think. Eric Weiner reflects on how travel awakens creativity and restores focus, proving that clarity often comes from carrying less and seeing more. (The Walrus)
One essay in a series of essays that explore the question,“why do we travel?”
How Trump-Era Politics Are Reshaping Fashion: From Barbiecore to Workwear (Teen Vogue)
Is fashion becoming more conservative? I know fashion is fickle and trends are fleeting, but what kind of world do we live in where fashion stops being fun?
The thing that wouldn’t die: why Gothic endures in visual culture (It’s Nice That)
Who else was a former high school goth?
For Women in the Workplace, the Struggle Is Real (MIT Press Reader)
Middle age is a really weird place to be in a career, especially for women. I can’t even count how many of my friends and peers are underemployed, unemployed, or reevaluating everything about their careers.
The Many Lives of a Face Mask. An anthropologist explores how the COVID-19–era surgical face mask went from a health precaution to a fashion choice among women in Peshawar, Pakistan. (Sapiens)
The face mask in Asian countries have long been a common accessory and necessity even pre-Covid. Women in Peshawar, Pakistan, have transformed facemasks into a multifaceted cultural symbol.
The Otherworldly and Ravenous Top 2025’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition (This is Colossal)
Some really beautiful and exquisite photos. Nature is always amazing.

To make and eat:

Roasted cauliflower, like this recipe (The Modern Proper). For some reason, we totally forgot about cauliflower all summer. We’ve since made up for it every week this month. So good even throwing it in the air fryer when the cauliflower gets crisp and almost caramelized.

To watch