Two premises of mine are that I’m more ambitious than nearly everyone I meet in meatspace and normal distributions. This implies that in any relationship, I should expect to be the more ambitious one.
I do aspire to be a nagging voice increasing the ambitions of all my friends. I literally break the ice with acquaintances by asking “how’s your master plan going?” because I try to create vibes like we’re having coffee in the hallway of a supervillain conference, and I like to also ask “what harder project is your current project a warmup for?”.
I’m mostly sure I want kids. I told a gf recently (who does not want kids) that if it seemed like someone would be a good coparent, but they made me less ambitious, I would accept the bargain. But what’s implicit premise here?
The premise is of course that in relationships, you drift toward the average of yourself and the other person. Is this plausibly true?
I think there’s a folk wisdom about friendships, which generalizes to romance, that you’re a weighted average of your influences, so you should exercise caution in picking your influences.
Also—autonomy to leave a deadend job and go to EA Hotel was an important part of my ability to cultivate ambition. What price should I put on giving up that autonomy?
However, according to Owain’s comment here, there’s not a super good reason to expect children to decrease ambition. But it’s complicated—that dataset doesn’t express parenting quality.
One comment you could make is “move to the bay and you’ll no longer be the most ambitious person you run into in meatspace”. I’m empirically not someone who needs to be surrounded by like minds in order to thrive, but plausibly like minds could still amplify me. (Separately, I think it’s important for everyone who can afford to not live in the bay to avoid living in the bay, because brain drain and complete absence of cool projects in non-bay cities seem really bad! But I understand that some people simply can’t be ambitious if they’re not getting social rewards for it)
I guess I wonder how best to cultivate ass-kicking, through the kind of automatic cultivation and habituation that comes built in to relationships.
I think 15-20% decrease in ambition is a reasonable price to pay for being a parent. I don’t know if that price is really exacted.
Ambition, romance, kids
Two premises of mine are that I’m more ambitious than nearly everyone I meet in meatspace and normal distributions. This implies that in any relationship, I should expect to be the more ambitious one.
I do aspire to be a nagging voice increasing the ambitions of all my friends. I literally break the ice with acquaintances by asking “how’s your master plan going?” because I try to create vibes like we’re having coffee in the hallway of a supervillain conference, and I like to also ask “what harder project is your current project a warmup for?”.
I’m mostly sure I want kids. I told a gf recently (who does not want kids) that if it seemed like someone would be a good coparent, but they made me less ambitious, I would accept the bargain. But what’s implicit premise here?
The premise is of course that in relationships, you drift toward the average of yourself and the other person. Is this plausibly true?
I think there’s a folk wisdom about friendships, which generalizes to romance, that you’re a weighted average of your influences, so you should exercise caution in picking your influences.
Also—autonomy to leave a deadend job and go to EA Hotel was an important part of my ability to cultivate ambition. What price should I put on giving up that autonomy?
However, according to Owain’s comment here, there’s not a super good reason to expect children to decrease ambition. But it’s complicated—that dataset doesn’t express parenting quality.
One comment you could make is “move to the bay and you’ll no longer be the most ambitious person you run into in meatspace”. I’m empirically not someone who needs to be surrounded by like minds in order to thrive, but plausibly like minds could still amplify me. (Separately, I think it’s important for everyone who can afford to not live in the bay to avoid living in the bay, because brain drain and complete absence of cool projects in non-bay cities seem really bad! But I understand that some people simply can’t be ambitious if they’re not getting social rewards for it)
I guess I wonder how best to cultivate ass-kicking, through the kind of automatic cultivation and habituation that comes built in to relationships.
I think 15-20% decrease in ambition is a reasonable price to pay for being a parent. I don’t know if that price is really exacted.