How Can We Accept Failure? Thoughts from an Existentialist

When I think about failure, the first image that comes to mind is the 17-year-olds on YouTube gathered around the computer with their families wearing matching Yale hoodies. They’re anxious and hopeful, with quivering fingers moving to the View Status Update button. My heart races nervously for them as the page refreshes and the sobs of rejection begin. Sometimes I even pray they get in, although the video is three months old and I don’t believe in God. When thinking about failure, I think about the father’s awkward shoulder pat and the mother’s flailing attempt to minimize it. What I am talking about here is something we will probably never learn to deal with. 

Constantly, we are aiming at ends. We set up objects and we work to possess them. Sometimes we get into Yale and sometimes we don’t. But even if we do get in, are we really possessing? Can we ever really possess? The truth is that we can’t; there is always a greater goal we will never achieve. We will always fail. Maybe we get into Yale but then we don’t get a merit scholarship, or our best friend we were hoping to go with gets rejected. We reach for a world we can make sense of, arranging the scrambled pieces into an order we are satisfied with. In a sense, the end we aim at is to Be God, which we are not. The only way to prevent failure from crushing us is to relish in our lack of Godliness and our inability to possess what we desire. 

I want to write as well as Joan Didion, but I know I’ll never be able to. Sometimes I cry while I read her work because it’s more beautiful than anything I could ever do. Does that mean I will stop writing? No. I only keep writing because I will never be as good. If I was as good as Joan Didion, why would I write at all?  

Of course, this causes us a great deal of panic and anguish. Accepting imperfection and disorder is not an easy feat. It’s universal to frequently experience bouts of sadness, depression, and the feeling your heart is plummeting down through your stomach and falling out of you. It is difficult—but essential—to remember that human pursuit is defined by failure. It is defined by the distance between what we want and what we get; a distance we can never close, no matter how many books we read, hours we study, or tears we shed. Yet, despite our constant will to, the distance is the very thing keeping us going. We must strive to close it, yet we must also accept it. I will never be satisfied with the college I go to, I will never find the words to describe what it feels like to be in love, and I will never figure out the purpose of my existence. If I did, there would be no reason to go on. 

I am reminded now of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity. “I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating,” she writes. “I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where I slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat.”