Wanting More Doesn't Mean Ungrateful

It’s 11:14pm and you’re scrolling LinkedIn in bed.

Someone you used to work with just announced something—a promotion, a launch, a pivot into exactly the kind of work you’ve been circling in your mind for years. You feel genuinely happy for her. And underneath the happiness, something else: a hollow ache you’ve learned not to name.

Why not me?

The thought surfaces and you push it down immediately. You have a good life. You know this. You can list the evidence—the job, the home, the relationships, the health, the privileges you’re aware you carry. By nearly any measure, you have enough. More than many. More than you once imagined.

So you close the app. You tell yourself to be grateful. You remind yourself that wanting more is greedy, ungrateful, too much.

But the wanting doesn’t dissolve. It just goes quiet—waiting, persisting, surfacing again at 11pm on a Tuesday when you see someone else doing the thing you won’t let yourself admit you want.

This is ambition guilt. The shame of wanting more when you already have so much. The voice that says desire is dangerous—that a good woman should be satisfied, and the fact that you’re not means something is wrong with you.

Here’s what no one tells you: that voice lands harder on women.

Research on high-achieving women found something striking: women who appear to “have it all” often privately feel like they’re failing everyone. They internalize the belief that if they were truly capable, they would juggle everything without wanting more, without struggling, without falling apart.

The ambition doesn’t go away. It just gets buried under guilt—and the guilt gets buried under performance. You say “I’m good” when someone asks. You downplay the ache. You tell yourself the wanting is the problem, when the wanting might be the most honest thing about you.

Here’s the lie you’ve absorbed:

That wanting and gratitude are opposites. That desiring more means failing to appreciate what you have. That ambition is incompatible with contentment—and if you feel both, something is broken.

This lie keeps you small. It keeps you apologizing for your desires before you’ve even spoken them. It keeps you performing satisfaction while something inside you insists there is more—and then feeling guilty for the insisting.

But wanting and gratitude are not opposites. They coexist. They always have.

You can be grateful for your work and crave a different kind of challenge. You can love your life and feel the pull toward something you haven’t built yet. You can acknowledge your privileges and still feel the ache of something untapped—something that hasn’t been given room to exist.

These aren’t contradictions. They’re not moral failures. They’re evidence of being human. And humans are not designed to reach a threshold of “enough” and stop growing.

The guilt around ambition often traces back to scarcity you absorbed without noticing.

Somewhere, you learned that wanting more means taking from others. That desire is greedy. That a woman who wants too much is dangerous, selfish, difficult.

Men with ambition are called driven. Women with ambition are called “a lot.”

So you learned to make yourself smaller. To want quietly, or not at all. To frame your ambitions as accidents—things that happened to you rather than things you pursued. To apologize in advance for taking up space.

But your ambition is not greed. Wanting more is not wanting to take. You can desire greater impact without diminishing anyone else’s. You can pursue success without framing it as zero-sum. You can want a larger life without believing your expansion requires someone else’s contraction.

Your wanting is not dangerous.

The only thing served by your shrinking is the voice that told you to shrink.

So what do you actually want?

Not the abstraction—more meaning, more freedom, more creativity. The specific thing. The one you don’t say out loud because it sounds ridiculous or selfish or impossible.

The project you keep postponing. The role you’ve been circling. The version of your life you think about when you’re alone in the car and no one’s asking you to be realistic.

Name it—if only to yourself.

Because the wanting isn’t going away. You’ve tried gratitude-as-suppression and it doesn’t work. The ache persists. The late-night scrolling continues. The question keeps surfacing: why not me?

What if the answer isn’t “because you should be satisfied”? What if the answer is “why not, actually”?

This is why systems matter more than willpower.

Ambition without structure becomes fantasy—something you think about but never protect. To hold ambition without guilt, you need more than permission. You need a container.

A morning when you work on the thing that’s yours—not the job, not the family, the thing that has no justification except that you want it. A decision made in advance: this hour belongs to the project, the application, the draft, the plan. A question you ask when the guilt rises: Is this shame protecting me, or just keeping me contained?

Structure that protects the wanting. Boundaries around the thing you’re not willing to abandon—even if you can’t yet explain why it matters.

You don’t have to choose between gratitude and growth.

You can hold appreciation in one hand and ambition in the other. You can say “thank you” and “what’s next?” in the same breath. You can be at peace with who you are and still committed to who you’re becoming.

The guilt that insists otherwise is not protecting you. It’s only keeping you small.

And you were not built for small.

You were not built to reach “enough” and stop.

You were built to keep becoming—grateful for where you are, honest about where you’re going.

The wanting is not the problem.

The wanting might be the truest thing about you.

— The Soft Era