We live in an age where wealth is worshipped, and goodness ignored.

Our culture’s most celebrated figures are not scientists, conservationists, or peacebuilders – but billionaires and influencers. Money has become a proxy for intelligence, even virtue. Not because it reflects those qualities, but because we’ve built systems that treat the accumulation of wealth as the highest form of human achievement.

What if we reimagined what it means to live a good life?

Rutger Bregman’s new book Moral Ambition offers a compelling answer. His premise is simple: ambition is not the enemy of virtue. On the contrary, it’s what drives real progress – when aimed at the problems that matter. Bregman defines moral ambition as the drive to apply one’s talents and energy toward the betterment of society and the planet, rather than just personal gain. We don’t need fewer ambitious people. We need more of them working on hard things: climate change, poverty, public health, democratic renewal.

To embrace moral ambition, we need to recover a more expansive view of human nature – one that sees our capacity not just for harm, but for healing, building, and renewal. We are not a planetary blight, as some now claim, but a species capable of immense harm and even greater good. To say humans are a plague is to give up on what we can become. Our future isn’t fixed; it depends on the choices we make together.

History offers proof of what moral ambition can achieve. Consider the abolitionists – the world’s first globally coordinated reform movement. Bregman highlights Thomas Clarkson, a brilliant Cambridge graduate who, at 25, experienced a moral awakening. Riding to London after winning an essay contest on slavery, he stopped – gripped by a thought that changed everything: “If the contents of this essay are true, it is time some person should see these calamities to their end.”

Rather than pursue a comfortable life in the church, Clarkson devoted the next fifty years to ending slavery. He travelled the country gathering evidence of cruelty – thumbscrews, branding irons, testimonies from former slaves – and faced death threats and repeated failure. Still, he and his fellow abolitionists took on the most profitable industry of their time. They used modern tactics – petitions, boycotts, data analysis – to do what most thought impossible: help dismantle an economic system built on human suffering. Bregman describes them as the consultants of their day – but with a mission.

Contrast Clarkson’s profound commitment with where many of today’s brightest minds end up. Clever, principled people full of potential spend their most energetic years optimising click-through rates or shaving nanoseconds off trading algorithms. The work is technically demanding. The pay is excellent. The impact is vanishingly small.

It is entirely possible to be busy, talented, well-paid – and wasting your life.

The problem is structural. Top graduates flood into corporate law, finance, and consulting not because they believe in the work, but because they are insecure high achievers. They have been conditioned to climb a series of ever-higher ladders – grades, degrees, internships, job offers – without ever pausing to ask where the ladder leads, or whether it matters. They’re not failing. They’re succeeding at the wrong game. We’ve made it prestigious to pursue work that is routinely meaningless.

This carefully constructed house of ambition may already be crumbling. AI is rapidly disrupting the economic logic behind many of these high-status roles. Jobs built on repetition, pattern recognition, or procedural abstraction – legal research, financial modelling, software engineering – are increasingly vulnerable.

What remains defensible is the kind of work no machine can do: the creative, the relational, the moral. It demands judgment, empathy, and imagination – qualities that resist automation and give work its meaning. As Alain de Botton writes: “One of the most unexpectedly important determinants of whether a job feels meaningful is simply whether or not you are helping someone.”

We already have exemplars. Sir David Attenborough, at 99, has directed his extraordinary talents toward Ocean, a documentary exposing the silent carnage of industrial bottom trawling. It begins with a net the size of a skyscraper, dragged across the ocean floor. Coral forests centuries old are smashed to rubble. Entire ecosystems – complex, delicate worlds of unimaginable beauty – are reduced to lifeless dust. Three quarters of the catch is suffocated then discarded across a seabed stripped of life.

Yet the great conservationist chooses to move beyond despair. He awakens us – not with fury, but with gentle clarity, dignity, and reverence for life. And in doing so, he offers a model of moral ambition: a life spent not in pursuit of self, but in service of something larger. When my wife Lara and I took our young children to see it, they were stilled by the devastation – but stirred by the example of a life lived in the service of something greater.

This – this – is what a hero looks like.

Yet our culture rarely celebrates such lives. A teen is more likely to dream of imitating an influencer whose talent lies in capturing online attention, or a celebrity whose singular achievement is monetising self-obsession. How did we arrive at a moment when chasing likes is seen as more impressive than fighting for change?

The answer lies in what we choose to celebrate. Our applause goes to those who amass followers, capital, and influence – with little consideration for what they build or destroy along the way. Meanwhile, those who repair, teach, heal and protect are ignored, underpaid, or quietly pushed aside.

Ambition isn’t selfish – it’s the human desire to matter, to be seen, to shape something that lasts. To harness it for good, we must reshape our symbols of success – honouring not those who master the game, but those who reimagine its purpose.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. We face converging crises: ecological, political, technological. We must direct our best minds toward our hardest problems – not just our most profitable ones. If we change the stories we tell, we can change the future we build.

So yes: grow, build, achieve. Generate wealth. Live well. But do so in pursuit – grand or modest – of something meaningful. Protect our oceans, restore nature, and confront climate change. Cure disease, defend the vulnerable, and build bridges – literal and figurative – where none exist.

Dream boldly. But dream of goodness. It’s the ambition most worthy of us – this astonishing, self-aware species – capable of mapping the cosmos, mastering the atom, and multiplying shared abundance.

To settle for less is to dim the light of what we could become.

About the Author

Luke Heilbuth is CEO of sustainability strategy consultancy BWD Strategic, and a former Australian diplomat.