On Camus's The Physics of Happiness Part 3

Life in the open air.

Love for another being.

Freedom from ambition.

Creation.

-Albert Camus

When I was first introduced to Albert Camus's The Physics of Happiness, I understood very clearly and very instantly the first two points. I knew life in the open air was important and in my younger years I work about a quarter of the year in the country living in a tent. I understood the importance of love of another being. I may not have understood it when love and friend was given to me, but I understood it all too well when it was denied to me. Yes, in my younger days, the first two points made complete sense. But the third point, freedom from ambition?

How is could freedom from ambition be reasonable to a young man in modern America. I was, and in many ways I still am, very competitive. I love a challenge and I especially enjoy a challenge which I can overcome. I may not be the sort of person who has to win a race, or a have the best time in an event, but try to play cards with me.

It's more than the small petty competitions. As a young person, we're programmed to strive for more. We're programmed to make more money. We're programmed to have the best job. It says nothing of meaningful work, just more power, more money. We're programmed to have that ideal of the American Dream. We are given our ambition from the society which has always been big, it has always shown growth, the allure of growth and the need for growth.

Our ambitions have led us from a small group of people in a cave in South Africa, to well over seven billion people all over the globe. Our ambitions have taken to the manufacturing of art and music. Our ambitions have taken to the recording of music, to the placing it on a golden record, placed on a spacecraft and taken us to the outer edges of the solar system with it. We are ambitious creatures, clever creatures and we live in a wonderful time in which we can have, we can be, we can do whatever we want. All we have to have is the ambition to become anything.

So why then should a recipe for happiness say we should have freedom from ambition?

I suppose looking at Albert Camus's philosophy, we know that he generally regards human endeavors as both absurd and futile as outlined in his book The Myth of Sisyphus. In the book he paints human endeavors on a continuum between suicide and revolt. He also explains that once we realize how ridiculous existence really is, we can find happiness. Find happiness and simply enjoy the rest of life. I wonder how his philosophy may have changed had be not died at the age of 46 years?

But what about happiness? What about ambition? As a young man, I did not particularly care for ambition in quite the same way that others did. I was not out for money. I was not out for power. I did not particularly want a job, either. What I wanted was experiences. As I was exposed to Albert Camus, my notion of ambition may not have been the common sort of ambition for the people my age at the time we were in both our personal histories and the history of our world. No, all I wanted was experiences. I would venture to say that in that spirit, I was an ambitious young man.

But to find the ambition is one thing. What about the freedom from it?

It occurs to me now that the freedom from ambition is not exactly the opposite from ambition. It occurs to me now that you can have a level of drive to do something, anything, and be free of the burden of ambition. For if you are so ambitious that you cannot see outside of a particular goal, you are very much imprisoned by the drive. Being free from ambition, therefore, has to be liberating. It has to have a level of peace. Freedom from ambition does not necessarily free you outright, it just frees up mental or emotional space. That's got to be worth something.

For me, freedom from ambition takes on a more Biblical feeling. In the book of Ecclesiastes, for example, we are taught to take it easy. In Ecclesiastes, we know that no matter what our labors do, someone else will benefit from it. We know that we should eat, drink and be merry. We know, as The Byrds sang, to every season, turn, turn, turn. I always felt like Albert Camus's idea of freedom from ambition was directly related to the Book of Ecclesiastes. There really is no point to any of this, so we may as well find some hedonistic pastimes to get us through.

But that's not really who we are as an animal, is it? If we realized that all of our wants and desires were rooted in ambition and then we believed that the freedom from ambition was where happiness really exists, would our ancestors have left their cozy home and walked around the globe?

If we can really find happiness in freedom from ambition it is this: if we put our ambitions in perspective, we'll be more likely to enjoy the day, the people and the process of life a little more.