An essay about a failed essay about failure
Commonplace Newsletter #119
I was starting to take myself seriously for a moment there, which is a really unfortunate situation to find yourself in. Deadly even.
See, some confluence of pretensions, ambitions and delusions led me to hit upon the misguided idea that I should write an essay about failure. Because that’s a cheery, easy to write about topic that the readership would be sure to lap up. So for week after week after week I scribbled away at a dreary draft and then tried to chisel it down into something that was readable, entertaining even. Self imposed deadline after self imposed deadline passed by, my readership all the while dwindling due to lack of new work. Due to any real sign of life on my part.
The fun hobby/creative outlet/part-time side business of writing online had degenerated into something of a joyless slog. Every time I was off shift from my real job I would sit down at my desk and shuffle around some miserabilist paragraphs that were littered with quotations from Samuel Beckett, Emil Cioran and other shiny happy members of the laughing brigade. And this was when I was not procrastinating, napping, staring into the distance and reading snidey bickering comment sections below YouTube videos that had nothing to do with anything, and rearranging the clothes in my wardrobe like the deckchairs on the Titanic. It got to be that I would look forward to the possibility of going on shift with all of its potential of receiving verbal abuse from the mentally unstable and the head injured.
I mention this not in an attempt to elicit some kind of sympathy1 but in an attempt to try and pin down just how I allowed myself to get into this situation. This albatross of an essay had for a while come close to completely killing all of the enjoyment and desire I had around writing. Yet I couldn’t leave it alone (as I have with previous ideas that clearly weren’t working). There was something here with this one, surely?
Well, there was certainly something going on during this process at any rate. So if you’ll indulge me I’m going to dig through the bones of this never-to-be-published disaster essay to see if there’s something that can be learnt from it. Or at least laughed at. Because heaven knows I’m due a few laughs, even if these do have to come at my own expense.
We live in an era of vanity, greed and image-curation-to-the-point-of-outright-deception. The default mode of being seems to be one of either insecurity masked by arrogance or arrogance masked by insecurity.
This was the opening gambit, the hook to draw the on-the-fence reader in. Can you imagine? In a time of essentially unrelenting negativity in the media and the online world this was what I was going to lead with. You can almost smell the Gitanes fug, you can almost picture the slant of my beret as I begin my not-as-clever-as-I-think-I-am diatribe.
It’s funny, I’m now nearly twenty years on from studying philosophy at a low tier London University yet it seems like the old habit of faux-deep pseudo-intellectualising dies hard. The Nietzsche/Kierkegaard/Camus toting2 pretentious lad still lurks somewhere inside me still. And honestly, it is freeing to admit that. The failure of The Failure Essay was in large part due to me still holding onto a desire to be (or rather seen to be) clever. And this essentially, is the opposite of wisdom.
I am fortunate enough to have a decent sized audience, yet I was evidently still insecure enough to allow myself to be drawn into the pseudo-intellectual game wherein you feel compelled to write overly long, overly dense, unnecessarily quotation and jargon heavy essays for the benefit of, well, who exactly?
Success is rare and fleeting, but failure lingers everywhere. Failure, in a certain sense, is our default state. Not everyone tastes success but we all experience failure. Not only are our careers and personal lives beset by failure, but also- on a long enough timeline- so is our health and our very lives.
After about 300 words of somewhat confrontational, telling-it-like-it-is throat clearing I presented this, something that could well be called the point of the whole thing. And like anything from the pessimistic school of thought it is essentially true, and certainly factually truer than many of the near delusional assertions that come from the more optimistic camp. But it all very much seems to be a case of winning the battle and losing the war, this supposedly hard won, clear eyed realism of the pessimist. In many ways I think we are defeated in life when we say we are defeated. I also think that as hackneyed as they are, a lot of the Rocky Balboa-esque motivational quotations are useful. Of course the montages and the manipulative score are corny but this doesn’t discredit their value3.
Little of worth can be gleaned from this watered down and hubristic failure-as-success paradigm. But actual failure is different. Actual failure is a worthy and neglected subject of contemplation. If you can stand to look at it directly and not plug your ears or avert your eyes from it, failure can reveal a lot. Much of what it offers is not pleasant, but it is the truth. And the truth, as they say, will set you free.
All non-fiction essay writing is the author talking to him or herself about his or her own life and its problems. The pronouncements are all notes-to-self, the generalisations are all specifics derived from painful personal experience, and the advice is what the writer needs to hear most of all. Few essay writers, if any, are honest enough to admit this. And so, this wrestling with success and failure as an idea is clearly something that’s been going on in my own head perhaps for the upsettingly cliched reason that the Big Four Oh is really not so far away at all now. And yes, I do think failure is an important subject worthy of contemplation. But I don’t think me beating you over the head with reams of examples of all the ways life can, will and does go wrong is particularly helpful to the reader’s mental state. There is tough love and truth telling4 but there is also something of a duty of care that I think a lot of writers neglect.
To present an argument and to offer well-argued evidence of how everything is dire before simply walking away is negligent, if not tyrannical. We see it all the time. Hey here’s something awful you’ve never thought about before. What should we do about it? I don’t know, I’m just a writer. See ya…
Shattering something that is whole, even if it is not especially beautiful or noteworthy, and then whistling away while the distraught owner has to pick up the pieces is the behaviour of a delinquent child, not someone who has the privilege of having people read what they write and possibly even give it some weight and credence. My idea was to take the reader on a journey (please forgive me for that turn of phrase) whereby I take them to the depths of contemplating failure before leading them to somewhere more hopeful. A classic narrative structure, the down before the up. But I couldn’t stick the landing, as they say. I had third act problems, which as any good writer will tell you are really first act problems. Courting misery without offering the lifeline of redemption or meaning is a cruel sleight of hand. It’s not something I want to be guilty of. But I was stuck without an ending. Hence the deadlines falling away one after the other.
I’m still not sure I do have an ending (at least not the tidy dispassionate kind that is the trademark the essay format), but I have a clean conscience at least.
Maybe the point is that failure (including the failure to write an essay about failure) becomes less crushing and total when you simply acknowledge it and allow it to play out. Or maybe the point is that failure loses some of its sting when you can laugh at it, and at yourself. Acknowledging the absurdity of our plans and of our vision of ourselves. Or maybe failure exists then as a means of humbling us. Failure leading to humility and humility leading to truth/wisdom was the initial point of my oh-so-serious essay on failure. But the problem with it at root was that humility is a very particular and surprisingly complicated concept to explore in an advisory way.
This is because humility in reality is not a standalone concept. It is part of a relationship, and a personal one at that. You see, we humble ourselves in relation to something else, and so while generic, one size fits all advice on this matter may well have been edifying to some readers, it may possibly have destroyed the self-worth of others. Humility leading to wisdom all depends on what we humble ourselves to, and on how we go about this in relation to our own personal struggles.
So given this I don’t see failure, and here I mean true and potentially devastating failure, (as opposed to the temporary blips and stumbles that turn up in the narratives of the success peddlers) as being something that can be responsibly explored via the essay format. And I think ignoring this would be a great example of how the need to be seen as being clever can get you into a lot of trouble. Taking yourself (too) seriously can get you into all kinds of jams in life, I find.
So to conclude this note-to-self, being good humoured is the way to avoid the pious lecturing trap of the self-appointed internet intellectual. If you aren’t able to see the absurd side of yourself, then you’re on the wrong path. The world already has plenty of realists and pessimists and miserabilists- both successful and unsuccessful- yet there is never an oversupply of people who can raise a genuine heartfelt smile, or generate warmth or make you feel something other than one of twenty synonyms for disheartened or angry at life.
Well, not solely to elicit some kind of sympathy.
Two points to make here. Firstly, these were the philosophers I was drawn to because they were signifiers of a certain floppy haired, underfed romanticism. It was all part of an image that was also fuelled by indie music and indie films and so on. Second, these thinkers’ works were more aphoristic and poetic and so easier to read and feel like you have at least something of an understanding of. Easier also to write essays and dissertations on their ideas versus Kant and Hegel and all of the powdered wig systematisers.
To be clear when I say that the manipulative scores are corny I’m talking more about the latter day Rocky-derived motivational copycat content. The original Bill Conte Rocky score is unimpeachable excellence and beyond slander in my book.
And this can only really be helpful when it comes from someone who really knows you and genuinely has your best interests at heart.
"Or maybe the point is that failure loses some of its sting when you can laugh at it, and at yourself."
This bit. Goals.
“I was starting to take myself seriously for a moment there, which is a really unfortunate situation to find yourself in. Deadly even.” What an opening line. Wow.