1. Every Life, Considered Critically, Is a Failure 

We are doomed – by being born human in a competitive age and with vivid imaginations – to be conscious of all the things that could have gone better. We are daily presented with deeply beguiling images of success: we know what wealth and fame, sex and love are like. But we experience most of them only through a thick pane of glass or in heavily compromised forms.

2. True Success Will Only Ever Be Possible for a Miniscule Number

Almost no-one gets to the top levels of business, only the tiniest fraction are famous, hardly anyone is happy in love, nearly everyone is very poor – and hardly anyone fulfils their best potential. 

This sounds like bitterness. It should be a relief. 

We misunderstand statistics. We keep elevating to a general rule the experiences of a few freakishly blessed people. We are as reckless with our hopes as players of a lottery.

For everyone, the moments of overt triumph are brief and rare exceptions. Failure is our true home. If we could fly across the world and peer into everyone’s lives and minds like an all-seeing angel, we’d perceive how very frequent disappointment is, how much unfulfilled ambition is circulating, how much confusion and uncertainty is being played out in private, and how many breakdowns and intemperate arguments unfold with every new day. And then we’d realise just how – statistically speaking – abnormal and therefore cruel the goals we have set ourselves really are. It would be a painful lesson in some ways. We might be shocked and saddened by what we saw. We’d be disappointed, of course, to conclude that in all probability, we wouldn’t achieve what we’d hoped for. But in another way it would be a comforting and deeply reassuring experience. We’d feel a little more tenderness towards ourselves for not having won a race it wasn’t in our remit to enter.

3. Have Compassion for Yourself

There are so many ways of telling the story of the same life. We do not have to be punitive. A more compassionate story is no less true than a self-hating one. You do not win a prize for being your own worst enemy. If you saw a stranger treating you the way you treat yourself, you would judge them unbearably cruel.

4. Mourning Your Mistakes and Disappointments Joins You to Others

Genuine friendship is founded on the mutual revelation of vulnerability, fragility and letdown. If we couldn’t at times feel we had wasted our lives, we would be blank and uncomprehending in the face of the troubles of others. We wouldn’t know how to make friends.

5. We're Also Forgetting, as We Obsess About Failure, the Many Bullets We Dodge

We fixate on what we miss but overlook the unknown troubles that might equally have come our way. We may well have failed, but we can count ourselves as deeply fortunate if we have, to date, managed not to encounter outright catastrophe.

#mind
#phylosophy
#failure
#cope
#help
#troubles
#human
#doomed
#homo
#sapiens