Ambition and fame: challenges for orientation. (New excerpt from my forthcoming book)

How can we think beyond the tyranny of visibility?

Ambition, in its original sense, is a vital drive. It is this capacity to project oneself, to aim higher than oneself, to surpass oneself, to evolve, to seek in the world a space for expressing one’s talents and commitments. Ambition constitutes one of the driving forces of personal and collective construction. It is nourished by cultural representations, social archetypes, mythologies of success that discreetly guide desires and imaginaries.

Today, in a world saturated with images and stories of instant success, ambition is confronted with a major distortion: fame has become the most accessible measure of achievement, and the “follower” its unit of measurement. Whereas time, gradual recognition, and patience were once needed to leave a mark, it now seems enough to be seen, to be followed, to be shared, and it has become more accessible. The desire for fame is not, in itself, a pathological phenomenon. It responds to a fundamental need for recognition, as shown by thinkers as different as Hegel, Freud, or Honneth. What is concerning is its drift: when the quest for visibility supplants the requirement of contribution, when the media scene becomes the only space where existence is experienced, where form takes total control over substance.

This shift is all the more striking because it becomes rooted very early in individual trajectories. Studies on adolescent aspirations reveal a constant increase in the desire to “become famous” as a primary life goal, sometimes at the expense of projects based on knowledge, commitment, or mastery. This evolution is not just a passing trend: it reflects a deep anthropological transformation in the relationship to time, work, and recognition. In a world where immediacy is expected, where exposure is continuous, where notoriety is accessible without mediation, it becomes tempting to seek immediate validation rather than the slow construction of a work or an expertise.

Faced with this situation, it is not enough to oppose fame and accomplishment as two contradictory poles and treat them as such. A balanced orientation must question the roots of these new invisible aspirations. Why has the need to be seen become so vital? What underlying anxiety does this quest for visibility aim to soothe? What affective lacks, what social insecurities, does it feed on? It is about questioning what is at play in each person’s story, in their symbolic wounds, in their experiences of recognition or erasure — not necessarily in deep psychology, but at least at a superficial level.