Aspiration, Meaning, & The Traps of Ambition

A Book Review of Agnes Callard’s Aspiration

To others, I made a bold decision to quit my job and chart a different course in 2017. Yet in my own experience of the event, there was no singular moment or decision made. This disconnect between my own experience and the narrative of bold all-or-nothing leaps has mystified me and driven a lot of my own writing about the process.

I thought I was alone in pondering this question until I stumbled upon a small reference to Agnes Callard’s work in a New Yorker article about decision making. Here is that passage:

Agnes Callard, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, is skeptical about the idea of sudden transformation. She’s also convinced that, no matter how it looks or feels, we choose how we change. In her often moving, quietly profound book “Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming,” she writes that “becoming a parent is neither something that just happens to you nor something you decide to have happen to you.” Instead, Callard maintains, we “aspire” to self-transformation by trying on the values that we hope one day to possess.

Wow! There was someone else out there so mystified by the process of change that she wrote a whole book about it.