Life After Ambition

Channeling the subversive and sharp-eyed voice showcased in her popular column for The Cut, Amil Niazi stylishly interrogates the aspirations of young adulthood, early middle age, motherhood, and life after ambition. Building off her wildly popular viral essays “Losing My Ambition” and “The Mindfuck of Mid-Life,” Amil Niazi explores what life looks like “post-ambition.” With sly humor and a deep literary sensibility, she interrogates her own evolving ambitions, and how it intersects with adulthood, motherhood, age, identity, class, and race, and how it has shaped her and a generation of Millennials. And—most importantly—now that she is done with ambition: what happens next?

An achingly relatable, intensely funny punch to the gut which reveals that, though we hide them from one another, we all have the same painful bruises. At its core, Losing My Ambition is about optimism—about the joy of choosing something different and the thrill of finding ourselves when we thought all was lost. A whip-smart reimagination of how to live our lives, Losing My Ambition reclaims mediocrity to tell us that it is okay to NOT have ambitions but to try and live a life that is true to who we are.

Author Biography

Amil Niazi is a writer and producer. She writes The Cut’s series on parenting, The Hard Part, and covers work and motherhood and how the two intersect. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Washington Post.