Failure- (Hamilton-H02)

        Failure

            Failure is a guise that we’ve all seen time and time again in some regard. Whether it be big or small, it's something that lingers in our everyday life. I can tell that it probably haunts us a little more than others given we have made it into this Honors setting. Always holding ourselves to a higher standard, striving for more and always having a massive load on our shoulders that sometimes feels too much to bear. Even with those massive loads, we don’t have to feel as though we are failing any of it. Today, I’m going to go through the different nuances of failure, both from a personal and societal lens. 

Living With Failure

Sports are put on us when we are younger to learn to handle failure in appropriate manners. We live in a complex reality, and we fail in the little plans we try to make ourselves all the time. If you make a to do list and end the day with some bullet points not crossed off, you failed. If you go to work out but leave the gym before you complete your entire plan for that evening, you fail. If you have any intention of doing anything ever, and you end up not fulfilling that intention... you failed. It’s good to fail though, as we hopefully learn from those failures and perform better next time. Maybe tomorrow, you can better adapt your time to fit all your tasks you need to get done. When you go to the gym, keep training until you’re able to complete your routine successfully. 

We also find much joy in other’s failures. Whenever we screw up and go to talk to others about it, they usually start off by telling you that you’re going to be just fine, and you’ve really got nothing to worry about. Then, they go on and talk about their own experiences and how they had their own failures. This may be to comfort you or to humor you, given they had a worse off experience. 

You don’t always have to blame yourself for failures. Is it more than likely your fault that you screwed up? Yes. But some things contribute to failure that are out of your control. For example, if someone has a big meeting at work and they arrive late because of an accident, they failed to show up on time. But no one could have predicted that accident was going to happen. There is more to the world than you, your actions, and the actions dealt onto you. So don’t have the negative events define you when there is so much more happening. 

Life as Narrative

            The first element is the conjecture that we are bound to story ourselves, presenting our lives as coherent narrative wholes. There is also ethical (that a good life must form a coherent narrative and it must be one whose subject says that narrative to himself).  To see one’s life as a narrative arc, heading for a climax that it may or may not reach, is to see it as a potential failure; but one need not live that way. A good life must form a coherent, linear story, one its subject tells herself. The typical structural components include an agent, an action, a goal, a setting, an instrument, and trouble. The narrative form that it speaks of is simple and linear. A situation arises, grows tense, peaks, and subsides. Narratives are hardly ever this simple though. Most narratives spiral, explode, branch into subplots. Life as Narrative calls for linearity and incidents leading one after another to a climax. 

Having a unified, linear narrative can harm you though. You set up your life to be one straight line, setting you up to fail. Defining your life as a single story arc will make that single story arc define you. No matter how simple your story is, there is more to you. The more little things we examine throughout our day, the more we can see our successes and failures. Just live your life accordingly. 

Living in today

In the book, The Idiot, Dostoevsky writes about a saint that is trying to help in others' lives. He failed a lot in trying to help them. Often times, his efforts went nowhere. But not a lot of readers would title him to be a failure. That’s not what the character was written as. You can fail many times and not be a failure. He is rather categorized by his strong will and motivations to help others. Life shouldn’t be defined by your failures, rather the way that one responds to such events. Our attempts build more character than the goal/ finished event itself.

Telic vs Atelic

            There are two types of activities. One type is that of which have a final state of failure or success. The other type is those that don’t have a terminal state, you don’t succeed or fail. Focusing on the second type can leave your life more open-ended and not pushed in one certain direction. 

            Telic activities have terminal states, you can finish them. Atelic activities are those that don’t have a seeming end. There is more value in atelic activities, as this showcases more of the process of doing the activity and not completing it. This allows us to live in each present moment and we won’t fail in doing so. You can’t fail when you’ve yet to finish; you’re still actively working on something. Telic activities only hold value in the past or future, not really in the present. You work towards something, and once you have it, you’ve immediately had it. With atelic activities, there is value in the process even if there isn’t a finished result, or even if it were to end in failure. 

Living In today’s society

             Whether you fail or succeed is often measured by our prosperity and economic status. Money rules the land. It gets to the extremes to that if someone loses their money, like during the Great Depression, they often killed themselves. Today, our life expectancy is decreasing widely due to white men that didn’t go to college through the likes of suicide and drug use. Much of this is because they see themselves as a failure and not doing what they need to do for themselves or others. 

Failure is inherently subjective. Some tasks aren’t completed, and depending on the necessity of getting it done, there can be different levels of failure. We fail all the time but to different degrees. There are complete failures, partial failures, minimal failures. But to label oneself as a failure is entirely different. I see the small failures as personal failure aspects. Labelling oneself as a failure would be more in tune with the societal failure aspects. Much like stated earlier, many of the greatest minds throughout history failed more than most people, but no one dares label them as an overall failure because they continued failing, and they continued learning. This led to them learning from their failures to then try again and not make the same mistake they had in the past.