How to Be a Failure and Still Live Well: A Philosophy

"What I admire about this book is that it takes on a topic that’s had a lot of exposure in popular writing in recent years… …and, indeed, this is something I touched on in my own book, the way we hear so much about needing to be willing to fail, and what people really mean by that and how helpful it really is, or isn’t. But what really impressed me in this book is that Clack connects the idea of failure to the idea of loss, noting how we confuse the two: maybe failure is avoidable in some sense, maybe it’s your fault in some sense, but loss is just completely intrinsic to being a human. Living and dying, getting old, finitude—these are just the fate we all face as a result of just being who we are in the situation that we are in. There’s a connection to Rohr here, because it’s about human limitation. “Maybe some aspects of our inner experience were better before we were reading books” She writes about her own experience of miscarriage as one particularly vivid way of understanding this kind of encounter with loss. But then the way we talk about ‘failure’ has this effect of—I don’t know if she would put it this way—implying that if you got things right, you could have avoided loss. And in certain specific situations that could theoretically be true. But obviously you can’t avoid the sense in which human life is about loss. Being a finite human is inevitably a matter of deciding which of your ambitions you’re going to focus on, because you don’t have the time or resources to do everything, so in this and many other ways, it’s all about facing the reality of death. She quotes Anthony Giddens, the sociologist, who writes that death is “nothing more or less than the moment at which human control over human existence finds an outer limit.” Clack also talks very eloquently about the fact that because human meaning is found above all in relationships of all sorts, there’s a sort of loss or failure that’s essential to a meaningful life, because relying on relations with others is another kind of expression of limit. It’s an expression of the idea that you can’t go it alone, you need to some extent to surrender to being in relationship with others. That in itself is an example of how not being completely in charge of yourself and your life outcomes is unavoidable, but also that you wouldn’t want it any other way, because that would be so empty. Does that make sense? Yes. It’s a philosophy book , but it’s very accessibly written. The effect it has for me is that—this is a theme that crops up in lots of places—if you come to see certain things that you are trying to do in your life as just kind of structurally, intrinsically, logically impossible, then it’s a lot easier to stop beating yourself up for not doing them, isn’t it? And this includes the attempt to avoid all loss, to not have to make hard choices and sacrifices with how you deploy your limited time and resources. It’s impossible. This is a theme of the book I’m finishing up at the moment as well. If you can get clear on what in life is actually completely inevitable versus what isn’t, you can bring a lot more time and energy to focus on doing a few cool, meaningful things with your life, rather than spending it railing against these built-in limitations of being human. Exactly. I think that connects directly. Because once you see that regret is inevitable, why stress about it? Kierkegaard had that funny line, “If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it.” You can be bound a lot less by trying to avoid future regret—which is a very limiting way of going through life, and keeps you from committing to people and projects—if you see that that ship has sailed. You’re going to have regrets, if you’re predisposed toward regret! (Unless you’re not the regretting type, in which case you won’t.) Because there’s no option where you get to live out a life of the married and a life of being single, a life of having four children, and a life of being child-free. Once you internalise that, you can throw yourself into whatever you do choose with a lot more vigour. Yes. That’s always the question with self-help books: what’s to stop you reaching intellectual insight but then carrying on with your existing, neurotic ways? But I think a book like this begins to wear away at certain ways of seeing the world that might have become entrenched, or calcified. It can open you up. It’s a very slow process. All I can say is, I read these books, and think through this stuff—then I look back on recent decades of my life, and I think I’m becoming a little bit saner, and doing a few more things that I’ll be happy and proud to have done with my time! But who knows what I’ll think later on? Yes. I think it’s also useful to cultivate the attitude that the advice you need might not be the advice you want to hear. But that’s a very difficult thing to tell someone else. And, yes, it’s a very clichéd, gendered thing in relationships, isn’t it—the person seemingly seeking advice actually mainly wants to be heard, but the other person responds by immediately coming up with solutions, which misses the point. And I am that really annoying bloke who goes straight to solutions—although I think less so than I was. Maybe some of the writing I do is an alternative outlet for that! But you’re absolutely right: people move too fast to the stage of, ‘here are the three fixes you need.’ In those Twitter exchanges, I don’t know what the original posters’ agendas are in the first place—being so public about anxieties or sufferings—but it isn’t usually that they want to be directed to a web page, or a three-step solution. That feels like it’s cheapening, as if it undermines your right to have those feelings. Yes. Another thing: I think advice-giving in general is almost always a kind of effort to work through your own issues, perhaps even to justify your own choices. I think it can be done transparently and with integrity—I hope that when I’m giving advice that I try to do that! But very often people are doing it to make themselves feel better, and they don’t always see that that’s what they’re doing."