“There was a chasm between who I was and who I was pretending to be”: Amil Niazi on her new book, Life After Ambition

Amil Niazi’s bracingly honest essays on work and motherhood (“The Mindfuck of Midlife” comes to mind) have made her a cult favourite in certain corners of the web. The Toronto writer and New York magazine columnist is now a mother of three, and her new memoir builds on her confessional oeuvre. Life After Ambition chronicles her experience of grinding toward a higher salary only to run head first into the pandemic, re-evaluate her life and say farewell to ambition altogether. With her trademark humour and wit, Niazi writes about her journey out of striving and into life itself. We caught up with her to talk about letting go of the pageantry of professionalism.

What was the genesis of this book? Eight years ago, I was working full time at the BBC in London. It was a great job, and I remember feeling that this was supposed to be the pinnacle of my success. Yet I didn’t feel connected to either my work or my family life. There were still remnants of girlboss and lean-in culture, and women were all, I want to work all the time! I never want to be offline! I started to imagine what my life could be if I leaned out instead.

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This book is much more than an essay on ambition, though—it’s a memoir of most of your life. Was that the idea going in? I spoke to many people in the process of writing this book—Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Claudia Dey, Jen Agg—who told me that often you pitch one thing and it very quickly becomes something else, and that’s not something to be afraid of. It became clear that this wasn’t a story I could tell in a series of disconnected essays.

There’s something profound about sitting down and trying to write your whole life out. Was it emotional? Very much so. I was surprised at how much writing about my childhood shook me. There are parts of your childhood you have to leave behind to be a good parent. There were days when I’d just sit at my desk and sob after eight hours of writing. It’s funny to revisit those parts of yourself that you feel are done and dusted emotionally but are actually still quite squishy and painful.

You share some dark moments from your adult life, including physical assault and addiction. Did those traumas trigger your renunciation of ambition? Partly, for sure. The person who shows up at work is a collection of all these different moments in life. Yet, in a professional setting, we encourage people to present a one-dimensional fiction of themselves. For me, the chasm between who I was and who I was pretending to be at work became so large that everything I did felt wrong. Those traumas coincided with the most prolific times in my career. I don’t want to run from them anymore, and I don’t want other people to run from their own either.

You write that the idea of meritocracy is undermined by the fact that many dreams are possible only with money and power. Is this an argument against ambition as a whole? Ambition is still an important and necessary tool, but in capitalism, it’s also designed to work against you. Right now, layoffs are hitting everyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re the best coder or the best McKinsey consultant. Your work ethic can be untouchable, and you can still lose your job to AI. I want to wrestle with that and ask what the next phase of striving looks like.

What advice would you give to your younger self, hustling away? It’s funny. Of course I want to go back and give young me the secret key to life. But it was the mistakes, failures, hardships and heartbreaks that got me here. So what I would say is, “Make more mistakes.” I wish I’d been less afraid to fail and brave enough to go after even more things.

So what comes after ambition? Honesty. Ambition has been a mask, and taking it off means facing who I am and what I actually want. I’m excited to see what showing up as myself will do for the next phase of my life. From truth comes exciting, beautiful, wonderful things.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.