How do you stay radically ambitious even when growing older?
A friend calls to tell me he saw slogans painted on the pavement downtown. “Impossible is just another kind of dare,” one said. I try to imagine whoever wrote it, crouched there in the darkness, rushed but certain; certain enough to defy gravity, age, or at least the indignities of arthritic knees. I'd like to think they were older, operating not from youthful urgency but from something even fiercer—a preservation of radical intention that comes precisely from knowing the world more intimately now.
They say youth is radical because it doesn't yet know disappointment—or perhaps because in youth, impossibility has not yet hardened into resignation. But I have come to believe something different. What if radicalism matures with age? Not softening, not fading away, but rather evolving toward a more vivid defiance—one sharpened by clarity, depth of spirit, hard-won from experience. Radical ambition, then, isn’t holding tight to youthful idealism—it’s continually reimagining rebellion, refusing exhaustion as the natural toll of years.
Micah White says activism’s highest purpose is breaking humanity out of its socially-imposed limits. I've thought about this a lot—these invisible fences we suddenly see as we grow older, these lines drawn quietly around us, telling us exactly what we can no longer do, think, become. In youth, activism feels external, like something enacted against the world that constrains you. But as you age, there's also a strange internal activism necessary, fighting off the seductions of repetition or resignation, wrestling constantly with stagnation that threatens to seep inward as you grow.
The Occupy Wall Street people once showed the startling power of shifting the lens: they understood activism not as linear and predictable but as some chaotic, quantum thing—taking leaps through unexpected openings in time and space, sudden clearings inside collective imagination. The older activists among them, those I knew, were not nostalgic marchers lamenting lost glories; they were always awake, ever alive to these surprising possibilities, these instant recalibrations of the impossible.
Sometimes I think about this impossibility—isn’t it just a self-inflicted limitation we're taught to respect as the years pass? Implicit permission to sit back, to quietly retreat inside the lines prescribed by age or practicality. But there is another choice: to transform impossibility from a wall into a challenge, from a sigh into a provocation. Occupy showed us what happens when we refuse to see impossibility as given—when we decide, patiently, stubbornly, to see it instead as something tender, vulnerable to wild experiments, reckless inventions, radical leaps. And the older you get, the braver you have to become to pursue these leaps—I think bravery is something coaxed out over time, not innate at all.
The other day, I read about ideas for “radical climate interventions” and “global decentralized mobilizations” and smiled, imagining someone my age—someone whose joints also creak a little more each year—still dreaming of overthrowing entrenched systems through ingenuity, intensity, concentrated hope. I picture these activists stepping lightly through digital networks, speaking softly so as not to awaken suspicion, yet plotting sudden quantum sparks of collective awakening. I like that phrase, quantum sparks, like neon tracings spreading unpredictably across a placid surface.
But what grounds this radical ambition as you age isn't just action—though action matters too. It's about still allowing yourself to dream the unthinkable, to wander into realms of imagination, philosophy, spirituality, and even art—these meta-political terrains where things feel less rigid, more elastic again. Sometimes, late at night, I wonder about consciousness, personhood, artificial life and colonization on strange planets. I wonder whether activism itself might be a kind of art, an existential questioning played out not just on banners and streets but also in living rooms, cafes, strange conversations between strangers. Activism as a bizarre collective novel we're all writing—maybe that's the way forward: seeing ourselves as authors of impossibility, creators of unexpected openings, seekers unafraid to step, over and over again, into uncertainty.
And now, what does this mean practically, for the lived truth of an aging radical? It means, perhaps, fewer conventional marches and more spontaneous. decentralized networks. It means gatherings that feel more like storytelling circles where vulnerability is shared and collective spirit renewed. It means constantly inventing—POC (protests of charm), DAOs (digital autonomous organizations), crypto rebellions and AIs holding anarchic salons. It means actions born entirely from a willingness to leap out of predictability, away from calculable results, toward something that crackles with real authenticity, something unrepeatable, yet human and wholly felt. It means carefully listening to our inner hunger and letting ambition sustain itself by turning impossible limits into a dare we extend yearly, with each additional candle flickering brightly on a birthday cake.
In the end, as we grow older, radical ambition isn't something we cling stubbornly to from our youth. It's instead a landscape we reimagine again and again, transforming the horizons of our possibility rather than their narrowing or retreat. It’s the deepest kind of freedom: to look out onto these expanding spaces and realize the impossible was never a prison at all, but an invitation—one renewed year by persistent year, quietly and urgently compelling us forward.
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A compelling historical case study that illuminates the evolution of radical ambition over one's lifetime can be found in the political practice and activism of Gustav Landauer (1870–1919), a German anarchist thinker whose work reflects a lifelong commitment to challenging entrenched systems not solely through protest, but fundamentally through creating concrete alternatives. Early on, Landauer rejected parliamentarianism and formed the Association of Independent Socialists, emphasizing direct resistance to established political norms, for which he faced significant repression, imprisonment, and persecution. Aging did not dull his activism but rather deepened and evolved it into new and increasingly constructive forms such as alternative aesthetics, cooperative ventures like the worker-consumer cooperative "Befreiung," and the political-theatrical initiative Neue Freie Volksbühne. His maturity brought not withdrawal but ever more ambitious radicalism, culminating in his establishment of the Socialist Federation, dedicated to creating cooperative settlements designed as tangible alternatives to capitalist and state institutions. For Landauer, activism meant stubbornly refusing the exhaustion of ideals into mere repetitions of youthful revolt, instead aiming ambitiously to embody a meaningful, ongoing transformation of society through innovative and enduring collective action.