When Nadia Meli walked away from the life she had spent years building, she found herself grappling with an unexpected consequence to her attempts at healing: Her ambition began to fade.
Meli—a portrait photographer who was born in Italy, raised in Germany and lives in England—shared her evolving perspective on ambition in a Substack post titled “The More I Heal, The Less Ambitious I Become,” which has resonated widely since it was published on November 26, 2023.
As Meli, 39, put it, the deeper her healing, “the deeper my courage to do what others won’t”—and by that, she means, abandoning the pressure to be ambitious.
Her reflections have struck a chord, particularly among millennial women who feel burned out by the demands of a culture that equates self-worth with achievement and glorifies the daily grind.
The post, which unexpectedly went viral in January for reasons that Meli does not know, questions ambition’s place in modern life, portraying it as a relentless force driven by capitalism and social conditioning rather than genuine fulfillment.
“Ambition is inherently selfish,” Meli wrote, adding, “Ambition requires you to sacrifice the things that matter most in life—people, love, peace—to achieve something that matters in the eyes of capitalism.”
‘I Had No Desire to Achieve Things’
Meli told Newsweek that the past six years of her life had been “deeply transformative.”
She walked away from a 10-year marriage, left the faith community she was raised in by Sicilian parents and gave up an international wedding photography career that had her traveling most of the year.
“It was crashing all at once,” she told Newsweek. “Would I recommend changing your life that way? All at once? Probably not. But that is my story.”
“While social media gurus and ‘success’ stories online sell us the quick ‘change your life’ message, I realized that changing your life is neither quick nor easy,” she continued. “Instead of taking weeks or months, it actually can take years.”
A composite image showing Nadia Meli’s Substack newsletters printed out and Meli posing for a headshot. @nadiameli
When Meli decided to dismantle the life she had built over the previous decade, she did not anticipate the effect it would have on her understanding of ambition. The photographer said she realized through the changes that what she thought was a “loss of drive and ambition” was simply her changing into someone new—someone who did not need nor want to be ambitious anymore.
“Ambition has given me some really great experiences, but everything has a shadow side,” Meli said. “Ambition has also taken a lot from me, too, and I make a distinction between passion or courage.”
“To me, those do not equal ambition. I can be passionate about something without seeking an outcome or wanting to achieve a goal, which is what ambition tells me I have to do,” she added.
By investing less time and energy into her work, which even resulted in her “struggling to get by,” Meli realized that she no longer wanted to return to a time when she was constantly striving.
“I realized I had no desire to achieve things,” she said.
