Perhaps tangential but I wonder if their framing of “ambition” as a bad thing is a product of translation or their reality.
Like imagine shells were used as a currency in some isolated tribe and suddenly there were these people who'd just collect shells for endless hours each and every day, to go bury them in their hiding hole, only to wake up and do the exact same thing the next day, only occasionally trading some completely inconsequential part of their shell collection for food or whatever. We'd certainly pathologize it, yet that'd be far less neurotic than what we do in our society since shell collecting is harmless whereas many of the things we do in pursuit of shells are completely self destructive.