Lack of ambition was impractical; no one could want nothing at all. It was not a virtue to reject this, as popular philosophy would have you believe. Wanting things is what drove the human life, and when I say human, I don’t mean some ascetic existence, but an utterly human one, the life we see when we go outside and look around. To live without the dirt of the average human day, the grit and gravel of our meaningless existence, was to deny ourselves the very experience of being human.
Abstinence from wanting was a great concept, but it was a concept. To take it to heart was a way to stagnate. To be human was to slowly kill ourselves in trying to get what we wanted. This did not guarantee we would get it, only that we would eventually die. This was how it was supposed to be; there is no sadness in this realisation; there is only peace. Most animals die running and panting and eating; humans die wanting.
Every want and dream comes at a cost, and all dreams are priced the highest in the aisles in the supermarket of time. This is because there is a premium on it all. Sometimes, we pay it freely and of our own volition. Other times, which is more often than not, life takes it from us by force. Life always takes higher than what is written on the little tag when we first pick a dream up and turn it around, looking at what it is made of and what it can do for us. To dream was to be ready to give something up.
This made it difficult to dream and, perhaps, infinitely easier to not want something. The hermits, the recluses, have not figured some great truth out; they’ve only taken the easiest option out of many. The dreamers are the ones who have found the meaning of life. To dream and to fail was to be human. Everything we see around ourselves was once a dream; even language, even these words, were a dream to convey clearly, to want to save those you can from imminent danger, to warn them.
As meaningless as life was, it was in dreaming—about love, art, money or a cup of coffee—where happiness existed. There was only the pursuit; to be human was to keep chasing until we ran out of time or parts of ourselves to trade. To live was to dream life away.