What is the meaning of personal failure? You fail to achieve a goal, or you fail to uphold your obligations. You cannot repay. You have no gift to give in return for the life you have in you, the time spent on you. Trying harder only results in more failure. You reach the end of your ability or your integrity but not the end of your journey. Is it meaningless?
Admitting Failure
Five Ways To Make Peace With Failure - Forbes
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/opinion/a-failed-earthquake-prediction-a-crime.html?_r=0
Day for Failure | Celebrate Failure
Failure is an illusion, sometimes useful, more often harmful. Your ego is obsessed with ideas of success and failure and how you’re doing relative to someone else. This is the world that breeds envy, resentment and jealousy. All these feelings are insidious, very powerful and damaging; they can easily dominate your thoughts and your life.
After the enlightenment human beings became the centre of everything. We were solely responsible for the discoveries, the inventions, the progress. No longer were such things ascribed to the gods, or fate or luck. As liberating as it is to own such successes, people also had to own their failures. This creates huge pressure for people, and a new type of language developed. It was once said that you
had a genius rather than
were one, as if you had something on board that was guiding you, taking the responsibility. Today you are that genius, and are responsible for all that you do. It’s unsurprising that so many creative people like writers had tragic lives, often turning to drink.
Today we call people 'losers' which is very different to calling them 'unfortunate' as we might have done a long time ago. The language conveys the fact that we put the burden of responsibility on the person, making it their fault if they fail. This is the unavoidable sting of a meritocratic system, owning not only your successes but your failures.
Our modern day is dominated by this culture of thinking, and egos are centre stage, being massaged or broken down. What we want, or think we want from life will be heavily influenced by this culture we grow up in. Being constantly shown how we should look, how we should talk, dress, live. Who we should be, what job we should have, what car, what sort of partner and so on. We are from the outset coerced into buying into this system, wanting or rather defining 'success’ in these terms.
Never really having the choice, you’re conditioned to think you want or need these things, and should you get them, well great, and if not you think you've failed. Not everyone can be rich for example, meaning most people are destined to failure with respects to this, feeling moral blame and the weight of responsibility on their shoulders for something they may never have been able to achieve in the first place.
I would propose that even if you get all these things, please your ego, have you really succeeded? or are you just as helplessly trapped in a false reality as the ‘losers’, possessing things that you were told/convinced you want? Loosing most of what makes you individual and authentic, the magic of your childhood self. To me even this sort of egotistical success is unavoidably a failure in the grand scheme of things. To be an actor in a bad play, whether you’re the king or the peasant on stage, all are equally tragic if they don’t realise that they are in fact on stage...
