The Geography of Ambition
Here is why -according to historians- your 4,000 weeks might be the most decisive ever.
In his latest book, Rutger Bregman writes about moral ambition: the combination of idealism and the ability to act. Not the naïve dream of changing the world, but the concrete attempt to make it happen. For him, the difference between those who leave a mark and those who don’t lies entirely there — in uniting the ethical tension of an activist with the operational discipline of an entrepreneur. To explain this, Bregman starts from a simple model divided into four quadrants.
On the horizontal axis: idealism — from “I don’t care” to “I want to make a difference.” On the vertical axis: ambition — from “I just want to get by” to “I want to have impact.”
In the bottom-left quadrant are the bullshit jobs — useless work that changes nothing and often doesn’t even improve the life of those doing it.
Bottom-right: the symbolic but ineffective — those who speak, signal, denounce, but never build.
Top-left: the wasted talent — brilliant but aimless people, ambitious but lacking ethics, often ending up in the “attention industries” or extractive finance.
And finally, top-right: the goal — moral ambition, where idealism and ambition meet.
It’s the rarest and most necessary zone of the contemporary world.
It’s the difference between working for yourself and working on something that lasts.
Now, think of it this way:
An average human life lasts about 4,000 weeks — 2,000 of work, 4,000 in total.
How we spend those weeks is how we contribute to history.
And today, in the place where time moves fastest and competition is fiercest, this reflection takes on a new meaning: Palo Alto, CA.
The Atmospheric Pressure of Ambition
In Palo Alto, ambition isn’t an abstract concept. It’s atmospheric pressure.
From childhood, you grow up inside constant competition — not to know more, but to do better: build, tell, persuade.
Schools here aren’t just places of learning, but true incubators of performance.
Classical knowledge — the kind that shapes critical thought, culture, and sensitivity — competes openly with everything else: sports are as important as math and can even open more doors. In local public schools you’ll find everything: woodworking, chemistry labs, orchestras, mechanical workshops.
Every idea can become a prototype, and every science fair or school event a training ground for future startup pitches.
The Religion of Technology
Kevin Kelly, one of Wired’s founding fathers, foresaw it twenty years ago in What Technology Wants: technology seems to have a will of its own, an autonomous trajectory.
It’s no longer just what we do — it’s what wants to be done through us.
It’s a fascinating idea, but also a dangerous one.
Because if technology “wants,” then humans stop asking why.
And if, at the same time, we lose critical thinking and overestimate social media as sources of information or AI as sources of truth, the path is set: what remains is sophisticated entertainment disguised as progress.
And yet, especially in recent months, here in Palo Alto, technology has taken on a religious function. Not in the folkloric sense, but in the deepest sense of the word: it gives purpose — beyond good and evil.
We have saints (the founders), temples (the campuses), relics (the designed objects), and miracles (the investment rounds).Ascension? It’s the Exit — the IPO multiplying loaves and fishes for hundreds of people becoming millionaires overnight.
“If we can do it, we should do it.”
That’s the liturgical formula of our time.
Exaggerated? Not really. Here in Palo Alto, there’s even a deconsecrated church where I’ve seen a startup event — with founders pitching right from the altar.
The Great Waste
And so, obsessed with miracles, we’ve spent generations of talent making notifications irresistible, studying human behavior only to sell more ads.
We’ve fueled attention machines that burn concentration, time, and critical thought as fuel. We’ve turned the collective mind into advertising surface.
And perhaps, indirectly, set humanity on the path toward one of its Great Filters — those points of no return that every intelligent civilization faces before extinction (thx Robin Hanson).
A Great Filter is an evolutionary threshold that very few species ever cross — not from lack of resources, but from excess of power.
When the ability to build surpasses the ability to understand, the curve breaks.
Our problem isn’t lack of ingenuity — it’s waste of ingenuity.
Technology here doesn’t liberate — it entertains.
It’s a world so upside down that — to fix OpenAI’s balance sheet — someone’s building a GenAI TikTok equivalent, with @sama playing the clown.
Entertainment, once again. From bro-mantic to the infinite scroll of GenAI.
And you can see that — from Palantir to Tesla — this isn’t just about Palo Alto.
What we build here becomes the story of the entire West: a humanity with smart fridges that no longer knows how to cook — or for whom to set the table.
All running against material scarcity, chasing every possible dose of digitally induced dopamine.
Three Truths and a Paradox
As Bregman said in an interview with Trevor Noah, three things can be true at the same time:
The world sucks,
The world has never been better,
We could do much more to make it better.
The real scandal of our age isn’t the absence of genius, but its direction.
Every new technology seems to increase our power — but also the distance between what we can do and what we should do.
The dissonance grows, as if we were a civilization training to run faster while forgetting where we’re going.
The moment when complexity outpaces the capacity of our hunter-gatherer minds — with an iPhone in hand. (cit. Gianandrea Giacoma)
The Concentration (and Infantilism) of Power
We’ve built a world where the ability to influence billions of people depends on the intuition of a tiny handful of individuals — who may have never developed a cultural or scientific vision matching their wealth.
They didn’t get rich by being architects of meaning.
Extreme concentration of wealth creates a huge problem of creativity and models.
I don’t mean to underestimate the pain of those who have less, or who can’t access healthcare or education. Those are individual, social, and — hopefully — temporary risks.
The systemic risk is different: when those shaping the collective destiny think like children, divide the world into friends and enemies, and draw inspiration only from a few sci-fi movies, we’re not facing an oligarchy — we’re living in Idiocracy.
Nonsense, at planetary scale.
The combination of technological power and poverty of vision is the new Great Filter — a cognitive limit disguised as progress.
And it can’t be overcome with more engineering, but with greater moral ambition — something that makes us focus on what’s worth building.
Not the ambition to become gods, but to act as responsible adults.
It’s not just a matter of injustice — it’s a matter of species survival.
The loss of purpose combined with the concentration of power is our next Great Filter.
You don’t need a catastrophe to end a civilization — it’s enough for its leaders to lose their compass.
Not an impossible challenge, but one that’s hard to grasp — something for which we need cognitive tools.
Rethinking Ambition and Why We Read Historians
Bregman, like Harari, doesn’t write to remind us of the past, but to help us understand where we’re going. Both move from data to morality: they remind us that history isn’t an archive — it’s an ongoing project.
And today — precisely today — humanity has never had more power to influence its own destiny. We’re the first generation capable of rewriting the climate, manipulating biology, creating alternative intelligences, changing the very meaning of life on Earth.
That’s why our 4,000 weeks matter more than any before.
Not because we’re special, but because we’re critical: what we do — or fail to do — will decide how long this story continues.
Reading historians today is a way to expand our species-level awareness — to recognize that every era believed itself at the center of history, but only ours truly has the power to end it.
Bregman’s moral ambition — idealism plus the ability to act — is one of the tools we need.
Even here in Palo Alto — the place with the highest density of brains and capital on the planet — shouting any slogan is enough to gain followers.
“Birds Are Not Real,” just to quote a textbook case.And if your megaphone is loud enough, and you can offer purpose, work, or money, you become the temporary god of a world that imitates Star Trek (on a good day), Ready Player One (on an average one), or Mad Max (on a very bad one).
Call me naïve, but — as my design Maestro once taught me — the point is never what you can do, but whether it makes sense to do it.
That’s where ambition becomes moral, and technology becomes human.
btw. I have one last question: How are you using your 4,000 weeks?
PS. Rutger Bregman (born 1988) is a Dutch historian and essayist.
He became known worldwide after his intervention at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where — in front of managers and billionaires — he reminded everyone that
“talking about philanthropy without talking about taxes is like hosting a firefighters’ conference where water is forbidden.”
He’s one of the most influential European voices of a generation that wants to replace profit rhetoric with the concreteness of impact.
Main books:
Utopia for Realists — Basic income, open borders, and a 15-hour workweek as achievable utopias.
Humankind — A counter-narrative on human nature: cooperative by default, better than we think.
Moral Ambition — Stop wasting talent and use your life — your 4,000 weeks — for something that matters.