Of all the things wasted in our throwaway times, the greatest is wasted talent. There are millions of people around the world who could help make the world a better place, but don’t. I’m talking about the ones who have got the power to shape their own careers, though you would never know it from their utterly unsurprising résumés. About the talented folks with the world at their feet who nonetheless get stuck in mind-numbing, pointless or just plain harmful jobs.
There’s an antidote to that kind of waste, and it’s called moral ambition. Moral ambition is the will to make the world a wildly better place. To devote your working life to the great challenges of our time, whether that’s the climate crisis or corruption, gross inequality or the next pandemic. It’s a longing to make a difference – and to build a legacy that truly matters.
Moral ambition begins with a simple realisation: you’ve only got one life. The time you have left on this Earth is your most precious possession. You can’t buy yourself more time, and every hour you’ve spent is gone for ever. A full-time career consists of 80,000 hours, or 10,000 workdays, or 2,000 workweeks. How you spend that time is one of the most important moral decisions of your life.
So what do you want on your résumé? Do you go for a respectable, if bland, list? Or do you set the bar higher? Morally ambitious individuals don’t move with the herd, but believe in a deeper form of freedom. It’s the freedom to push aside conventional standards of success, to make your own way along life’s path, knowing that it’s a journey you can only make once.
Those looking to do some good in today’s world don’t have to look far. Still reeling from a global pandemic, we’re seeing hunger surge for the first time in years. Meanwhile, autocrats are on the rise, while the number of people forced to flee their homes has topped 100 million for the first time. And as temperatures hit one record high after another, climate scientists are stressing the need for “the biggest and most fundamental transformation” of society ever attempted in peacetime.
In short: these times call for moral ambition.
Now, you might be thinking: that’s all well and good, but I’ve got a full-time job, two kids and a mortgage. I’m happy to recycle and eat some tofu now and then, but a “fundamental transformation”? No thanks.
In that case, moral ambition may not be for you. I mean, once you have a labradoodle, a set of cheese knives or a robot mower, there’s generally no going back. But if that’s irritating to hear – and I imagine it might be – then by all means, prove me wrong. I have learned that there are always exceptions, and I want to show that you can be that exception. It’s never too late to step up.
Let’s start with a simple model of what you can do with your talents. Whether you’ve got your whole career ahead of you or are looking to make a change, it seems to me you’ve got roughly four options:
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Category I jobs
Not that ambitious, not that idealistic
Some jobs simply don’t add much value. These are people writing reports nobody reads or managing colleagues who don’t need managing. Recent research shows about 8% of all employees think their own job is pretty pointless. Another 17% confess to having some doubts about whether their job contributes to society.
The late anthropologist David Graeber (1961–2020) had a highly technical term for such positions: bullshit jobs. What jobs are we talking about here? Well, we know which ones they’re not. In 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, lists of “essential workers” popped up everywhere: from cleaning staff to street sweepers, teachers to firefighters, bus drivers to nurses. These are the people who keep the world running; they don’t need a lecture on moral ambition.
But there’s also a class of not-so-useful jobs. A class of influencers and marketeers, lobbyists and managers, consultants and corporate lawyers – all people who could go on strike and the world would be just fine. Remarkably enough, this group includes many men and women with impressive credentials and equally impressive salaries. Reminds me of that Facebook employee who said, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
For some in this not-all-that-ambitious, not-all-that-idealistic category, there’s an escape hatch: becoming financially independent. Countless self-help books lay out how to get rich with minimal effort, so you can get out as soon as possible, then kick back and relax. Loads of people in their 20s or 30s now dream of accumulating passive income – from shares, cryptocurrency or real estate – so they can “earn” enough to retire early.
Nothing wrong with having some savings and investments, of course. But at its core, this kind of thinking always seems a little sad to me. It means you’re chasing a form of freedom where you won’t have to lift a finger. The dream is to make the transition from office serf to modern-day feudal lord – living off passive income while other people do the actual work.
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Category II jobs
Ambitious, but not all that idealistic
The second category of wasted talent consists of people who are ambitious but not so idealistic. Or, put another way, these people want to reach the top, but use soulless indicators for success: a fancy title, a fat salary, a corner office or other perks.
Take graduates from the world’s most prestigious universities. Approximately 45% of Harvard alumni go into finance or consulting. A poll from a few years back shows that in my country, the Netherlands, 40% of “high achievers” (college students with excellent grades) aspire to work for major consulting firms such as McKinsey or the Boston Consulting Group.
We’re talking colossal waste of talent here. Economist Benjamin Lockwood, who studied at Amherst, the elite private college in Massachusetts, noticed many of his fellow students went into fields with no clear added value to society. In 2017, Lockwood and two colleagues published a groundbreaking study showing many of those former classmates now cost society money. (Think banking execs who need bailing out with public money.)
A corporate lawyer, for instance, does $30,000 of damage to society each year, a commercial banker more than $100,000. That’s a lot of money, but if you ask Lockwood, he stresses that the opportunity costs are much higher. That’s economic jargon for: just think how much better shape our world would be in if these bright people had done something useful with their careers.
Take consultants. These talented people are at best helping others be a little more productive. They don’t start new organisations, don’t come up with new innovations and generally don’t concern themselves with the most pressing challenges facing us today.
If you’re among the top in your field, you can afford to go skiing regularly or buy that beach house you always dreamed of. But is that really all you want out of life? Surely there’s more to it. Many young consultants, according to the Financial Times a few years back, “feel they add little value to the world and lack a sense of personal growth, community and purpose”.
Things aren’t much different for many entrepreneurs. I was scrolling through lists of successful startups recently and spotted a couple of inspired initiatives – a company working on cultivated meat, an enterprise building a solar-powered car and an organisation developing a nasal spray that protects against viruses. Very promising stuff.
But more often than not, we’re offered solutions for problems we didn’t know we had. Take the category “best young entrepreneurs”, where I came across the firm offering an electric toothbrush-head subscription. Or yet another food delivery app, a personalised vitamin service, or that mattress startup that advertised on every podcast in my feed a while back.
Now, I don’t have anything against mattresses, and getting a new head for my toothbrush in the mail every other month sounds handy, honestly. But you’ve got to wonder what the founders of companies like these could have achieved if they’d taken on a challenge like, I don’t know, the 5.4 million infants and children worldwide who die each year from diseases we can easily – easily! – prevent.
What if they’d put their talent towards something that really mattered?
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Category III jobs
Idealistic, but not all that ambitious
And then there’s a third category, made up of people who are idealistic, but not that ambitious. It’s a combination often seen in gen Z – people born since 1996. Many young people are far more idealistic than their parents and are focused on a number of the big challenges of our day, whether that’s the climate crisis or racism, sexual harassment or inequality.
But something seems to be missing. You see it in young people’s take on their careers: with no interest in joining the capitalist rat race, many want work they’re passionate about – and preferably part-time. Sometimes it seems “ambition” has become a dirty word, incompatible with an idealistic lifestyle. Many people are more preoccupied with the kind of work they do than with the impact that work has. As long as it feels good. “Small is beautiful,” you’ll hear. Or “think global, act local” – as if achieving little is somehow a virtue.
In some circles, you’d think the highest good is not to have any impact at all. A good life is defined by what you don’t do. Don’t fly. Don’t eat meat. Don’t have kids. And don’t even think about using a plastic straw. Reduce! Reduce! Reduce! The aim is to have the smallest footprint possible, with your little veg garden and your tiny house. Best-case scenario? Your impact on the planet is so negligible, you could just as well not have existed.
Don’t get me wrong – it’s a fine idea to align even your smallest deeds with your biggest values. (And not eating meat from factory farms seems to me a moral minimum.) But surely a good life consists of more than what you don’t do? One would hope that on your deathbed, you can chalk up your life’s work to more than simply all the harm you didn’t cause?
Seen this way, even the most moralistic movement shows a serious lack of ambition. I’m talking about those called “woke”. Often accused of going too far, woke activists in many cases don’t go far enough. Take the preoccupation with the words we use to describe the world. Yes, words matter, and to some extent even shape our reality. But in the end, what you do matters far more.
If we look at the concrete successes of these kinds of activists, the results seem meagre. True, you can reach millions these days in no time with an online rant against sexism, racism or capitalism. Kill the patriarchy! Defund the police! Tax the rich! But what happens next? Having lots of followers on Instagram isn’t the same as building an effective organisation. Going viral isn’t the same as winning a majority in the legislature.
For actual change, far more is required. How do you build a coalition? How do you lobby effectively? Where’s the money coming from? Who plays a key role in that commission at local, state or national level? How can you find out what buttons to push, and when? And who has the knowhow to tweak legislation in clever ways?
The trouble with idealists who lack ambition is they tend to prize awareness more than action. But here’s the thing: awareness alone won’t help a soul. It’s at best a starting point, while for many activists, it seems to have become the end goal.
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Category IV jobs
Idealistic and ambitious
Is there another way? Say you take the ambition of a high-flyer and add a generous dose of idealism. What do you get?
Let me introduce one of my personal heroes, the British author and activist Thomas Clarkson. In 1785, as a 24-year-old university student, Clarkson decided to enter an essay contest in Latin at the University of Cambridge. To take part, he had to answer a short question: Anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare?
That is: Is it OK to force others into slavery?
At the time, winning a Latin essay contest was the way to make a name for yourself at university. “I had no motive but that which other young men in the university had on such occasions,” Clarkson would later recall, “namely the wish of being distinguished, or obtaining literary honour.”
There was just one small problem: Clarkson didn’t know a thing about slavery. Students had two months to put their thoughts to paper, and while most only started to feel the pressure once the deadline was imminent, Clarkson was different. He got straight to work.
The earnest student thought he would enjoy the research process. But the facts hit hard. “In the daytime I was uneasy. In the night I had little rest. I sometimes never closed my eyelids for grief.”
A few weeks of hard work later, his essay was finished. In powerful prose, Clarkson concluded that slavery was “contrary to reason, justice, nature, the principles of law and government … and the revealed voice of God”. And, you guessed it: he won first place. Clarkson was invited to present his winning essay in the majestic Senate House at the University of Cambridge. There he stood, a towering young man with fiery hair and bright eyes. All signs indicated Thomas Clarkson had a glorious career ahead of him.
But on the way back to London, he couldn’t get the subject of his essay out of his head. He got down from his horse and walked, distracted. He tried to convince himself he’d made some mistake, that the grisly facts couldn’t be right. But the longer he thought about it, the deeper the truth sunk in.
When the little village of Wade’s Mill came into view, he stopped and sat down, glum, at the side of the road. “Here a thought came into my mind,” he would later write, “that if the contents of the essay were true, then it was time some person should see these calamities to their end.” If the end of the global slave trade started anywhere, it started here, at the side of the road outside Wade’s Mill.
Of course, there had been others who protested against the most heinous forms of slavery. And certainly, history is filled with acts of resistance by enslaved people, who time and again worked to throw off their chains. But the fact of the matter is that for centuries, victims of the system weren’t able to overthrow that system. The very notion of abolitionism, the idea that the whole institution of slavery could be abolished once and for all, long seemed unthinkable.
One evening, at a dinner with a few other abolitionists, Clarkson made a decision. The young man knew someone had to dedicate their life to the fight against slavery, and so he stood up and announced to everyone there, “I’m ready to devote myself to the cause.”
That may sound a little melodramatic. And if you read Clarkson’s memoirs today, you can’t help but think, Easy there, Clarkson, you seem mighty impressed with yourself. But make no mistake, idealism often comes with a shot of vanity. With many a world-saver, it’s tough to say where the idealism ends and the vanity begins. But real-world deeds are more important than intentions, and when it came down to it, the ambitious college student kept his word. For the rest of his life, for 61 more years, he continued to fight for his ideals.
In 1787, Clarkson became one of the 12 founders of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Ten of the others were entrepreneurs. Go through their archives today and you’ll find to-do lists, action plans. While the French abolitionist movement was led by writers and intellectuals (and didn’t get much done), the British movement was run by merchants and businessmen.
After a years-long campaign, the UK officially banned the slave trade in 1807 – at a time of peak profits, no less. The British then forced other countries out. The Royal Navy launched the “blockade of Africa”, where they captured 2,000 slaving vessels and freed those aboard.
“In the end,” two experts estimate, “direct British efforts accounted for eliminating 80% of the slave trade.” From 1807 to 1867, the British put an astronomical amount of money into enforcing the ban: nearly 2% of the national income, or four times the UK’s current foreign aid budget. The researchers speak of the “most costly international moral action in modern history”.
The historian Christopher Leslie Brown – one of the foremost experts on British abolitionism – was once asked who the most consequential individual was in the British anti-slavery movement. Brown answered that, at the start of his career, he was determined not to give too much attention to individual heroes. He wanted to focus on the structural causes of abolitionism. But the more time he spent with the archives, the more he realised some individuals did have outsized influence – Thomas Clarkson in particular. “As far as the movement goes,” Brown said, “Clarkson is essential to what ends up emerging.” Clarkson grew to be one of the greatest reformers of his time. What the apostle Paul was to Christianity, and Martin Luther to the Reformation, Clarkson was to abolitionism. A “moral steam engine”, a contemporary called him, a “giant with one idea”.
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I’ve spent years researching the Clarksons of our time: activists and entrepreneurs, doctors and lawyers, engineers and innovators, all bursting with moral ambition. What they have in common is a refusal to see their own deeds as drops in the ocean. They believe they can make a difference and are prepared to take risks to get there. They don’t just think, “Someone should do something about that” but take action themselves.
What many of these people also share is a certain degree of privilege. Not everyone can devote their life to the world’s biggest problems. Clarkson could never have been a full-time abolitionist without the inheritance his father left him. Still, people suffering from poverty and illness, racism and sexism can move mountains, too. Helen Keller (1880–1968) was blind and deaf, and became a renowned advocate for people with disabilities. Malcolm X (1925–1965) grew up in deep poverty and became an iconic leader in the struggle for civil rights.
True, people with moral ambition often pay a price for their ideals. Malcolm X paid with his life. And even for those blessed with long lives, moral ambition can take its toll. Clarkson travelled 35,000 miles in seven years – on horseback, and often at night – to bring his pamphlets and petitions to the people. At 33, he suffered a nervous breakdown, or what we’d now call burnout. Year in, year out, he’d filled his brain with the horrors of slavery, in facts and figures and brutal images. “I am often seized with giddiness and cramps,” Clarkson wrote in his journal. “I feel an unpleasant ringing in my ears, my hands tremble. Cold sweats come upon me.”
So no, Clarkson wasn’t exactly mindful, and should have done his breathing exercises. It’s in nobody’s interest for the folks making the world a better place to collapse at 33 and have to be carried off mid-fight. But at least he didn’t get burned out from scrolling through never-ending spreadsheets or sitting through yet another PowerPoint. “I was therefore obliged, though very reluctantly,” he wrote in his memoirs, “to be borne out of the field where I had placed the great honour and glory of my life.”
So ask yourself the question: what’s the “great honour and glory” of your life? What do you hope one day to look back on? “A person of honour cares first of all not about being respected,” writes the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, “but about being worthy of respect.” Your honour is not the same as your reputation. It’s not about looking good; it’s about doing good.
One thing’s for sure. If you want to lead a morally ambitious life, there’s no time like the present. Fear of change is often the first sign of ageing, and before you know it, you’re in golden handcuffs: stuck in a ho-hum job with no time to spare and all your money earmarked for things like that toothbrush-head subscription.
But make the leap and the possibilities are endless. Because so many others waste their talents, people with moral ambition can make a world of difference.
• This is an edited extract from Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman, translated from the Dutch by Erica Moore and published by Bloomsbury on 24 April at £20. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
• Rutger Bregman will appear live at Intelligence Squared on 23 April in London and 24 April in Edinburgh
