Women are in the midst of a revolutionary reckoning with our ambitions. We’re not resigning en masse—because who can afford to quit her job in this economy?!—but we are trying to figure out a new set of goals and guidance for our professional lives. Thanks to long-simmering inequality and stubborn sexism, clarified by the pain of the pandemic, our definitions of success increasingly lie outside the realm of work. We are waking up to the fact that our jobs are never going to love us back. And we are trying to adjust accordingly.

When Kim Kardashian was dragged for declaring, in her signature vocal fry, that “nobody wants to work these days,” she was a little bit right. We don’t want to work ourselves to the bone, clocking overtime hours without overtime pay, for a vanity title at a soulless corporation anymore.

At this point in our collective professional history, women are looking for something more. Or is it something less?

If you narrowly define ambition as the pursuit of money and power, then the last century was one of increasingly ambitious women.

Women’s progress stalled before our ambition did.

It’s become apparent that many of the promised rewards of professional striving are never going to materialize. Why, some women are wondering, should I keep trying so hard?

“Yes, I’m ambitious,” a friend told me recently, “but climbing the corporate ladder does not interest me like it used to. A title, a bump in pay—it’s not satisfying. What I need to feel successful and fulfilled is completely different. Am I doing something that brings satisfaction? Do I feel like I’m learning? Do I feel like I’m contributing? Do I feel like I’m connecting to other people? Do I feel like I have flexibility in this new way we live and work? Am I given not only responsibility but autonomy? Am I in a place that aligns with my values? The things that I am looking for have changed.”

What’s happening now is a restlessness, a searching, a wholesale reexamination of the role that work should play in a woman’s life and identity.

But now, instead of breaking the glass ceiling, Birdsong says she and many other women would rather leave the building altogether. “I want to go and sit beneath trees, or sit in a field, or whatever,” she says, laughing.

Work has always been a necessity, and therefore less about narrowing the national wage gap and more about just putting food on the damn table. Many of these women have been sounding the alarm about the untenable nature of American labor for years now, and are leaders in the movements to organize at places like Starbucks and Amazon.

rethinking of ambition is a more recent twist for those of us who get paid a salary with benefits, and who absorbed the idea that we could possibly advance feminism while also advancing our own careers.

The widespread Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020 prompted many of us to develop a new understanding of the unfair systems that underpin much of American life. And of course, the pandemic has revealed everything from the gaping holes in the safety net to the unequal domestic work of heterosexual relationships to the fragility of our health—both mental and physical.

For many of us, the ambition to rise through the ranks in our chosen field has dissolved into something simpler: the desire to not feel so stressed and exhausted all the time.

Rainesford Stauffer, author of the upcoming book All the Gold Stars, makes a distinction between ambition that is rooted in personal meaning and ambition that is about proving external worth. Meaningful ambition often centers on things like community and creativity, with goals like feeling connected, whole, and healthy.

Then there’s the bigger picture: Are we failing future generations of women when we don’t throw ourselves wholeheartedly against the glass ceiling? Even the question is a bit of a trap, says Mukhopadhyay, placing an individual burden on women when it should be a collective one. It’s not on each of us, as workers, to better the world for all women. The gains of previous generations of social-justice movements teach us the truth: Collective progress isn’t gained through one exceptional individual’s achievements.

Redefining ambition is about knowing which professional things to set aside, and it often takes some support to figure it out. She adds, “It’s one thing to know you want to shift your career and maybe align it with more purpose and meaning, or really focus on a more value-based way of living. It’s another thing to actually figure out, Okay, well, what does that mean? And how am I going to actually make that happen?”

Letting go of the idea that our titles or salaries define us is difficult even for those of us who say we know better, because American culture venerates the idea that we are all individually responsible for our success as human beings. We’re taught that we can get anything that we need on our own, that if we don’t succeed it’s because of some failure within us.

In reality, “most of what you need is going to be outside of you,” Kate Bowler, author of No Cure for Being Human, said in an interview with GQ last year. “It’s structural justice and a community that holds you, and coming to terms with your own limitations and frailties.”

For ambition to be sustainable, it has to be personal and complex, not just about rising through the ranks.

Ambition does not have to be limited to a quest for power at the expense of yourself and others. It can also be a drive for a more just world, a healthier self, a stronger community. And it’s definitely achievable in soft pants.

Ann Friedman • What Comes After Ambition?