The Psychology of Ambition

The Psychology of Ambition

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The Psychology of Ambition
The Psychology of Ambition
All for Adam

All for Adam

A humanist meditation on the divine, occasioned by the birth of my second child

Dr. Gena Gorlin's avatar
Dr. Gena Gorlin
Jan 16, 2023
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The Psychology of Ambition
The Psychology of Ambition
All for Adam
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Three years ago I started a Wordpress blog that would eventually evolve into this Building the Builders newsletter, and I titled my inaugural post All for Alice. It was written 10 days after the birth of my first child, and it explained how it was that she’d inspired me to start the blog—an aspiration that had stagnated for many years while I focused on climbing (or at least not getting hurled off of) the academic ladder.1 

This post is a kind of meditative sequel to that first, occasioned by the birth of my 2nd child, Adam, 10 days ago. It is a musing on what my new baby and his symbolic namesake mean to me.

Naming him “Adam”

The name Adam was originally my husband’s idea. He liked how it sounded, the fact that it’s near-ubiquitous across cultures without being particularly common in any of them, and, of course, the fact that it connotes partaking in the tree of knowledge of good and evil: 

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