So this is my first column.

Understandably, I’m writing this with hesitation and anxiety. It’s not that I have a fear of the public reading my words (I’m a newspaper reporter), but these are my intimate words. They’re my own thoughts.

Honesty, as I was writing this entry, I kept psychologically torturing myself about how this column had to be good. That thought spun a web about how I wanted to one day be a media mogul, and no one would take me seriously if I wrote a bad column, which would be found on the Internet by some editor that just happened to work for “The New York Times.”

It’s good, even healthy to worry about your future. Actually, it’s motivating. Some might even call it ambitious. But how far can we take our ambition before it becomes detrimental?

I often like to play on the example of Icarus and his refusal to listen to his father’s advice of flying too close to the sun. His father, Daedalus, a master Athenian craftsman, constructed wings made from feathers and wax for his son to escape Crete. However, wax is merely an adhesive, and yes, it melts in extreme heat. So Icarus went tumbling down into the waters, where he drowned.

Morbid, yes, I know, but it’s an interesting example of how pride and ambition is seen as detrimental in history.

And we as humans have a tendency to spread ourselves too thin. We overwork ourselves to the point of exhaustion, and we often sacrifice natural resources and the health of our planet to build larger cities. Sometimes I wonder if it’s all worth it. Maybe we’re meant to be complacent creatures who work modestly to ensure we have the basic needs on Maslow’s hierarchy met.

I’ll draw another example. Before I transferred to UT, I attended a small Catholic university called Loyola in Chicago. I had an amazing professor there who taught an introduction to International Studies course. On our first day of class, he showed us a short video from a BBC nightly news segment about a small village in Ethiopia. The people there didn’t have luxury foreign cars, they didn’t have two-story houses, nor did they have a specialized safety unit. But they did have a designated elder to settle village quarrels and a small school. They had to walk over a mile to get clean water and they shared their home with animals, but they were comfortable. They didn’t, at least on the video, complain.

So obviously there’s a way to live life without leaving behind a heavy carbon footprint or excessively worrying about gaining material wealth or our status among our peers.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m the quintesential 21st century future career woman. However, burnout is frequent and often I wish to escape the rat race of reaching the “best” position possible on my career. I feed into the magazine articles that tell you how to get ahead and how to live your life the way I want to.

We can’t all be the greatest, yet we attempt to make it our reality everyday. Our parents tell us to be the best we can be and Nike tells us to “Just Do It.”

Most Americans often feel pulled in different directions and tire of the never-ending rat race of trying to climb the corporate ladder. It’s one of the hardest aspects of reality that we face; yet, people still keep bouncing back for more.

I often think of the cliché relationship often portrayed in Hollywood films of the uber-focused career woman who doesn’t have time for love or the focused, and often perpetually irritated, career man who doesn’t have time for his kid (queue the Harry Chaplin song). Our ambition can be emotionally draining too and can also have detrimental effects on the here and now

It’s in our DNA though. Humans share the innate, inner voice that tells us to be better, to nurture our passions, and to follow our dreams. But there has to be a balance. We’re strong, but we’re not hard-driven to stress out every day and reach so far that the sun melts our own internal wax: our sanity.

There has to be a balance, like everything else in this world. It’s give and take. Somehow between the first sentence and this last paragraph, my first column became easier to write.

I’m only human of course.

— Victoria Wright is a junior in journalism and electronic media. She can be reached at [email protected].