Ambition and Friendship

This is not some sort of new insight, but I think I have my own two pence worth to add. Ambitious people seem to find it hard to enjoy friendship, but perhaps not only for the usual cliche reasons we assume, namely, that ambition leads to greed, selfishness, megalomania, and betrayal, which all keep one away from friendship. Put it Biblically, it is more difficult for an ambitious man to have a true friend than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. While these reasons are undoubtedly valid, they are usually only applicable to people with more extreme forms of ambition, such as political and monetary ones.

However, for the less belligerently ambitious people, the above may not always apply. In fact, more positive forms of ambition, such as determination at self-improvement and self-refinement, may equally render one unsuitable for enduring friendships. The self-conscious and self-critical are trapped in a constant anxiety to improve his current state minute by minute, and thus suffers from a disturbing, sometimes suicidal, remorse regarding the stupidities that he has committed in the past, including yesterday, or perhaps several hours ago. Such a perverted form of ambition at self-improvement usually leads to a highly conscientious individual, who has no time to waste, because each second wasted is a chance lost for improving himself.

Herein lies his incapability for friendship, for the latter is a form of emotional attachment which implies certain duration. If one does not anticipate a friendship to last, one is not entering into one in the first place. That could be better termed as contingent companionship. Friends coming from one's past trouble one because they mercylessly remind the conscientious individual of his 'stupid' past, and his inability to shake off that dreaded past. When old friends appear, one is naturally required to reminisce, and to conjure up memories of the past, which, for that ambitious individual is a fetter to his constant self-transformation to greatness - however that is defined. There is something self-contradictory in the essential features of human condition and the emotional needs that human beings commonly perceive imperative or virtuous.

If sex can be had for ever, without the urge and longing before it and the contrasting disaffection and apathy (and for some even guilt) after it, will sex still be enjoyable?? All human relations in that regard are actually like sex. It is enjoyable, but it's going to end; it is enjoyable, because it's going to end. And in particular relation to friendship, a friendship that has outlived its expiry date becomes an encumbrance, a fetter to progress. This rule applies to in fact all people, but is naturally more acutely felt by the ambitious. To say friendships are like clothes, to be worn and indulged in for a period, but to be deserted after some time, is likely to cause repugnance in many; but there seems hardly a better metaphor. People grow, and their old clothes become no longer fit; or when people's taste changes, the clothes become no longer desirable. It is as apt as such.