March 6, 2023
Embrace Failing, or How to Live Free
I’m deliberately provocative, I fully admit. I’m asking you to embrace failing, supposedly promising you this will let you live free. Though the title isn’t a clickbait (in the sense, I really do mean it and I will argue for it), there is more nuance involved.
If you’re a thinking reader, you should first and foremost identify the ambiguity involved in this title. “Embrace failing” doesn’t quite reveal anything, in the sense that it doesn’t communicate what “failure” really is. Just think of how difficult success is to define, and you’ll see why. “Live free” contains similar problems.
I’ll try to unpack all this, but here’s a word of warning: In a truly meta- kind of way, it’s likely that I’ll fail in my attempt. That is, I don’t feel I’ll be able in this post to properly explain why you should embrace failing, let alone why it should help you live more freely.
Why I still go along with it is part of the lesson, of course.
So, I Embraced Failing – or rather, It Embraced Me
First of all, before I talk about how I was embraced by failure (this way of expressing it will reveal its importance in a while), I want to talk about what inspired me to write this post.
The truth is, every now and then I’m going through a period of very intense creative self-doubt. It usually resolves itself after a while. Its essence isn’t quite the same as impostor syndrome, though there is overlap. Basically, the underlying theme is that being good at so many things only reminds me that I’m also not excellent in so many things.
This might sound stupid, but it’s really just a more complicated way of saying it’s tiring to be a “master of none”. As I often say, knitting feels like quantum mechanics to me. But this also means that I feel no pressure, no sense of inferiority (in lieu of a better word), because there can’t even be a comparison with people who can knit.
On the other hand, since I write, play guitar & bass, take photos, etc. etc., I tend to compare what I do with what others do. It’s not a competition against people, but against myself. If I see that something is possible but I can’t quite reach the same level (though how do we define that?), that’s a hard pill to swallow.
Why Embrace Failing?
In a world enamored with quantification and results, with hustling and industrialization, “being good at” is equivalent to “knowing nothing”. On the other hand, however, I have enough life experience (a fancier way of saying I’m getting old) to realize that’s not a game I want to play.
Truth be told, it never was; even when I was younger. I mean, after getting published being still in my early 20s and becoming disillusioned well before my 30th birthday, I began to realize how the world works. I also realized that, 9 out of 10 times, hard work takes you about as far as “good enough“.
Why bother stressing and struggling just for the sake of it? To borrow the words of Eda Clawthorne, from The Owl House, quitting is like trying but easier.
However, there’s an important element here. I alluded to it above, when I mentioned being embraced by failure, rather than embracing it.
True Freedom Comes When You Don’t Have a Choice
This might sound counterintuitive – if not ironically/humorously so. It’s a subtle concept, to be sure, but you can see traces of it in Albert Camus’s thesis on embracing the absurd.
In reality, true freedom is something you realize; it’s something that has happened. Slavoj Žižek, among others, has talked quite a bit about this.
A bit like falling in love (it’s ludicrous to say “I will fall in love”, and I’d argue even “I’m falling in love” is problematic), freedom is something you realize you have had. That is, true freedom sort of lands on you and you – again, sort of – have to go along with it because you don’t have much choice.
Let me concretize it.
- There is another universe, where I continued writing marketing-friendly books (heck, maybe even supernatural romances, who knows…). In this other universe, I’m pleasing my audience and my publisher, and I hypocritically tell the media and everyone, really, what they need to hear.
- In yet another universe, I stayed in the academia. I met the right people, said the right things, became enamored enough with “the program”.
These are only two examples, but the list could continue in smaller areas. What these two above (and probabilistically every other) have in common is that they would all signify a success of some sort.
Failure Is Success in Different Things
To put in another way: In this universe, I have failed in all these efforts. Notice how I didn’t embrace failure at first; it embraced me, rather. That is, I would’ve (then) liked something else, but I had to accept a different outcome.
The thing is, allowing failure to embrace me – embracing failure in return, in other words – has certain repercussions: In none of these alternative universes would Home for Fiction exist. Similarly, I wouldn’t have written any of the books I have in the past decade. Needless to say, I wouldn’t have made any programs, either.
I had no choice, really. I only woke up one day (poetic license…) and realized “Yeah, it seems I’ve failed in X. But because I’ve failed in X, I can do Y. Fuck it, I might as well do it”.
To Embrace Failing, Understand what You Truly Want
This is a bit of a cliche; it sounds like some disgusting motivational quote – and as you know, “I’m generally opposed to wisdom, wisdom is the most disgusting thing you can imagine”.
Yet there is a point in it.
Failure is success from a different perspective, the way a good narrative can present an antagonist as a protagonist, with the nominal protagonist as the actual antagonist.
Failure is disruption, but disruption can often be the only way to enlightenment.
More importantly – though this will be a very subtle point – failure will be yours alone, whereas many people will attempt to appropriate success. If you’re wondering why that is a positive thing, see it from the perspective of the heading: It allows you to understand what you want, rather than going with the flow and what society prescribes.
Failure is lonely, and often painful, but so is freedom.
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One must learn how to be alone. That should suffice to withstand failure as something else than mere misery. But the question that set us up for wisdom — how does one live a good (just, fair) life? — remains unanswered.
The definition of a good life is, I believe, a subjective matter. More still, it’s a temporally problematic matter, as Solon perhaps first portrayed. I mean, as I said in my post, often freedom is imposed on you and you only realize it after the fact (which is an imminently paradoxical sequence of events).
In plain terms, I think we will not find a common recipe for “a good life” that can be applied consistently to more than a single person (and if it did, it would be purely by accident). To me, a good life means certain things; to you, it might mean some of the same things plus (and minus) some others.
Notice that this, in my opinion, doesn’t invalidate your observation: The question how does one live a good life does remain unanswered. Perhaps necessarily so!
There are built-in drives – procreation is one – from evolution, and then there is how little control some of us have of circumstances. And then there is that piece in the middle, which might be quite small, of what YOU want to do.
Writing is mine. Every day postponed getting back to finishing the third volume of the trilogy makes me nervous that I will end before it does; and will have wasted whatever talent and dedication I have on something stupid like paperwork.
This is my thing, and I have nothing else. My ‘legacy’ in the scientific field was ended in 1989, not by choice, and I can’t fix anything about it. The kids are doing fine on their own – we just zoomed with them. I WANT this, I itch to get back to it, and am endlessly frustrated by the physical and mental delays from trivia.
That’s not a good situation to be in. And it is a damn poor situation to market from. If it’s up to me, I plod straight ahead to the next scene, the next paragraph, the next words. And am happy. Even when the words are hard to birth (it happens to us all at some times), I write about WHY they’re hard, and that is pleasurable, and usually ends up resolving the problems, if they have solutions I can force.
I read about, listen to, others’ decisions. You’re not the only writer I know who has decided to make their work freely available – they usually end up doing SOME writing, because it’s like breathing, preprogrammed. Or switch to a less public version of writing. I’m not doing that yet, nor by choice: and it irks me that circumstances are forcing me to do anything else – when I may never be able to recover the time. Or even be sure of a working mind. I live in a place with failing minds, of some truly brilliant ones. The obstacles are personal affronts.
I don’t know precisely why it matters, but I want this, and everything else has failed, not by choice.
Ah, yes; health. It’s one of those things – I’m sure one could find some others, too – that greatly affect out ability to do one thing or another, at least partially.
One thing I’ve discovered based on my own experiences – that may or may not apply to others – is that we often conflate one desire for another. That is to say, we often think we want something a certain way (perhaps influenced by other people or society and culture at large), when in actual fact this is only a partial reflection of what we really wanted.
For me, “being a writer” was such a thing, in the sense I had associated it with selling books, even making a living out of books. It was only after I saw “how the sausage was made” that I realized I didn’t want any part of that.
Another example is flying: I wanted to become a professional pilot when I was in my teens. Perhaps a cliche (many boys want that), but in my case it reflected actual desires, only distorted. 30 years later, I still love flying – and know enough about the industry to realize I could never work in such an environment, with such peculiar hierarchies. Maybe as a bush pilot, at most – which is probably near the equivalent of what I’m doing know writing. A bush writer? 😛
Found it! Thought you might enjoy seeing you are not alone:
https://thelanguagenerds.com/2023/countrys-dream-job/
A very interesting map indeed. Peculiar, surprising, disturbing… I’m running out of adjectives here!