Trying Too Hard at All The Wrong Things

There's a lot of failure going around.

Maybe you've noticed.

Before the pandemic, only a third of Americans believed they were happy. A 2018 study in Emotion identified the key problem. As the authors write, "overpromotion of happiness, and, in turn, the felt social pressure not to experience negative emotional states, has implications for maladaptive responses to negative emotional experiences." In two separate experiments, they discovered that stressing the importance of happiness (and success) made people brood more over their setbacks and failures, without doing anything about them.

You can see the vicious cycle we're stuck in.

Today, we never stop hearing about the mental health crisis. Time and again, everyone from gurus to public health officials attribute it to loneliness and doomscrolling, never identifying the real problem.

It's our obsession with happiness and success. The harder we try, the worse we feel, the more we buy, the more we sacrifice in exchange for worthless political promises. In many ways, the system itself is designed to nurture and exploit our unhappiness for endless profit. Deeply unsatisfied people who don't understand their own minds buy more stuff.

They keep it all going.

A recent study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology got my attention, "The Exaggerated Benefits of Failure." As they point out, Americans spin on the cliche that failure fuels success, something we hear all the time in endless speeches, videos, and internet posts. In 11 experiments, the authors found that it's not true.

Not at all.

In fact, people routinely overestimate how much someone will benefit from previous failures, whether it's an exam or a heart attack. The majority of those who fail don't spend enough time analyzing their failures or changing their habits. Instead, they brood. They chug down a self-help book or some inspirational listicles, and they get right back to the same habits and routines that led to failure last time, even while talking about hard truths and painful lessons.

Here's the most interesting part:

As the authors learned, when people actually understand how often failure is just failure, especially in the context of events like drug addiction, poverty, or illness, they do more to support their communities. They become more understanding.

They help.

So, here we see yet another way that self-help and the life coach industrial complex has ruined society. Everyone goes around quoting the Stoics at each other instead of actually dealing with reality.

It's even bigger than self-help, though.

Failure only helps if you live in it for a little while. True failure comes with quite an emotional hurricane of disappointment, anger, despair, desperation, resentment, maybe even some jealousy, and a big dose of self-doubt and second-guessing.

You have to feel it.

Look around.

Do you really see anyone processing their failures right now?

The biggest component of true failure lies in something Americans are especially bad at: Admitting when they're wrong, when they've made a mistake, when they've caused harm to themselves or someone else. They have to be willing to listen and try again, not just at what they want to work or what they wish would happen, but with the actual ingredients of reality in front of them.

Do you see much of that?

I don't.

My biggest failure happened a little over a decade ago, when I published my first book with a little indie press. None of my mentors helped me promote it. Most of my friends didn't come to any of my readings. Some of them even complained about the possibility of missing their afternoon workout. Newspapers got the title of my book wrong, along with the times and dates of signings. Bookstores forgot my events and sent people home, telling them there was nothing planned. Famous authors I'd interviewed and promoted couldn't remember my name or even meeting me. They invited me to speak at their universities and then changed their minds a week later. Finally, my editor told me he didn't like my writing.

"It's too dark," he said.

Despite all that, the book won two awards. It got solid reviews in newspapers and magazines, when they bothered to read it. People who made it to the end said it had them in tears and admitted the prose was beautiful.

So...

In reality, failure comes in a lot of shapes. There's hard failure, like when you don't pass a test or an exam. Those come with real consequences. They don't let you practice medicine or law. They don't give you that diploma. They don't let you drive a car. Then there's the soft failures, like coming up short on your own goals. Those don't always come with the same concrete consequences. They just make you feel like garbage. They eat away at you.

Then there's the kind of failure where you expected so much more to happen from all your hard work, and it just doesn't. Sometimes it has nothing to do with how smart or talented you are, or how much work you put in. It has a lot more to do with forces beyond your control, ones that you often struggle to understand. In some cases, you failed simply because nobody wanted to make room for you.

Those failures hurt the worst.

There's one last kind of failure, and it's not even trying. That kind of failure lives in pessimism, but it can also hide in sweet vibes. Consider how many people don't want to have hard conversations or take on the slightest inconvenience, even if it saves lives or protects them from chronic illness, all because they don't want to feel uncomfortable or risk making someone else angry.

When you scrape off all the vibes, you find a dark nihilism. You find the belief that people aren't capable of change, and we have no choice not only to accept a lesser evil, but to celebrate it without the slightest hint of criticism or hesitation.

That also smells like fear. It's not the kind of fear we're often accused of, which is just practical decision-making. It's helpless fear, masquerading as joy, the kind of joy that snaps into rage the moment you question it.

Right now, western societies have married toxic positivity. One corporate media outlet after another extols the virtues of "vibes," declaring Americans apparently don't care about plans or policy. It sounds an awful lot like the trash you hear from life coaches and entrepreneurs about failure and happiness.

There's an inverse correlation at work here.

Time and again, throughout psychology, we see that the glitter doesn't stick. You can't force yourself into happiness or success by simply failing over and over again and trying harder with the same plan. If you asked most adults, they would readily tell you that's the definition of insanity.

And yet, here we are.

Insane.

Since 2020, a watershed year in so many ways, there has been no substantive change in our collective approach to anything, unless you count the unified, predictable will of corporate interests and their propaganda outlet to deny, downplay, minimize, and censor anything that would contradict their good moods. But as we see in these studies, a good mood is never enough to get the job done. Pretty words about failure only set people up for bigger failures and greater disappointments down the line.

Being honest about failure actually convinces them to do something about it.

Imagine that.

My own failures still haunt me. They've changed me. My attitude toward failure has evolved over the years. If I'm going to fail in the face of forces I can't control, then I can at least do it with intent and purpose.

Sometimes I wonder what would've been if mentors and friends had shown up for me, if newspapers had gotten dates right, if bookstores hadn't accidentally canceled signings, if the universe hadn't conspired against me.

It's a pointless question.

Here's the more important one: What did I do with that failure? How did it turn me into the person I am now? Do I like that person?

Yeah, she's all right.

If you're going to fail, do it on your own terms. Whether it's elections or anything else in life, you can't control whether you win or lose.

You can just control what you do.

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