This rings true to me. Perhaps the strangest part is realizing that managing your own ambition is a necessity for living a healthy life. Pure, unbridled ambiti

This rings true to me. Perhaps the strangest part is realizing that managing your own ambition is a necessity for living a healthy life. Pure, unbridled ambition can theoretically have a massive reward, but it's far more likely (statistically) to cause you to neglect other meaningful life pursuits to a damaging degree. In other words, I am the only one who can increase or decrease my own ambition, which means that I can't avoid responsibility for the fact that I am less ambitious now than I was coming out of college. I am mentally healthier, but it's also entirely possible that, had things worked out a little differently, I could have been just as (or more) ambitious and _also_ been mentally healthy. Being aware of this in some ways makes it harder to further downgrade my own ambition in service of a better life. Some things you can fully control, and others you can't. I can't fully control the rejections, but I can control how I manage my ambition and how I view my life. I'm not sure this is particularly satisfying, but it's better than many alternatives.