Why Failure Is So Painful

Most things tend to exist on a spectrum. The pain that comes from failing at something is one such thing.

Burning a cake in the oven could be said to represent your failure of making what should have been today’s dessert. But this failure is unlikely to strike you with much anxiety. Yes, perhaps your ingredients and time went to waste; perhaps you were really keen to eat cake today.

But is this going to keep you at night? In a few weeks, months, or years, are you going to experience a painful recollection of how you burnt a cake on that Sunday evening?

It’s highly unlikely.

You will say this is obvious. Failing to make a cake on some arbitrary day is an insignificant event. In all likelihood, you’ll forget about it by the following morning because it never really meant anything to begin with.

Meaning. How exactly do the things in your life become meaningful?

It is a question worth considering because you indeed only care about failing at those things you consider somewhat meaningful or significant.

The person whose parents have just died may look back with serious regret over how they failed to spend more time with them. The person who finds themselves working dead-end jobs may look back with serious regret over how they failed to do well in school.

But failure doesn’t just loom in and attack like a ghost from the past when you consider how your life currently is. Oftentimes, the pain from failure is immediate and present.

The test you ended up failing. The job you didn’t get. The person that rejected you.

These things will not only stab you here and now, but they may also come back to haunt you later. This is when failing at something hurts the most.

But, what does it really mean to fail at something? A technical definition is easy enough: You fail at something when you don’t achieve the result you had hoped for.

However, a more interesting question, I think, is to ask who is the one failing.

A computer that fails to download a file because it lacks storage space feels nothing about how it was unable to achieve the thing it wanted.

Humans aren’t computers. They can do something no computer has been able to do to date.

Humans think about who they are.

It is this ability to consider an identity that leads to every

Success

Failure

And emotion

That a human being feels over the course of their life.

The pain of failure hurts because the human being considers the failure an event that has significant repercussions for their manufactured sense of self.

The truck that hits you on the back of every major failure does so because it generates a rift between who you currently are,

And who you imagine yourself to be.

When a person sets out to achieve some result or attain some success, a series of images are generated within their mind. They think about the person they will be once they get the result. They think about how others will now perceive them. They think about what this means for their future and the story of their life.

Failure hurts because it robs from you the things you needed to become the person you wanted to be.

But is this so?

Did life really steal anything from you? You feel like a victim and the pain from failing hurts,

But how can you be robbed of something you never had in the first place?

Perhaps you failed to accumulate the wealth you desired. Perhaps you failed to secure the attraction of the one you desired. Perhaps you fail to ascend to the status in society that you desired.

You are a failure. No one admires you. No one looks at you and thinks: I would, in some way, want to be like this person.

You feel hurt at the failure that you are. You feel hurt because you didn’t get the things that you wanted.

But does something not strike you as odd…

Why would you reel in the pain of something that was never yours?

Your problem is not the fact that you failed. The problem is that you generated a series of images in your mind about who you would be if things worked out.

Once your mind had hooked you into this shiny new identity, you had already lost.

People often say that a life spent achieving exceptional things is a worthy use of time. We praise the elite athlete, entrepreneur, or author. We consider these people a success.

But I would say that success, as most people understand it, doesn’t exist. Failure, however, does.

If failure is defined as not achieving some result you desired, success would be achieving the result you wanted.

But, the thing is, you never really get what you want.

Success isn’t what you think it is. And you can understand this by diving deeper into failure.

If you don’t get the job promotion and the money and status that comes with it, you feel the pain of failure.

You feel the pain of not getting something you never had in the first place.

Is that not bizarre? If I told you about a rabbit that was depressed because it wanted to be born with the long neck of a giraffe, would you not think of this as ridiculous?

One never succeeds by setting out to achieve anything because the very setting out for something is to take a step backwards. If you then ‘succeed’ you simply get to take one step forward: You only end back where you started anyway.

Perhaps you’ll protest. Perhaps you’ll argue that envisioning lofty goals does not involve taking steps backwards only to later inch back forward.

Perhaps you’ll say everything is about going forward, and setting out to achieve some ideal life is itself a step forward.

But if this were the case, failure wouldn’t exist. Yet, it does.

The reason failure hurts is that once a person sets out to find something — whether they realise it or not — they have taken a step backwards. If they now do not get the thing they want, they have to deal with the pain of being behind.

Success is nothing more than getting back to where you started.

Here’s the thing: A human being is born with nothing.

The gravest mistake they make in life is believing they will have anything more than nothing during the course of their life.

They will flock to amass wealth, receive admiration for their bodies, and attain the respect of their peers.

And so, a life of frantic chasing and anxiety ensues.

Only the rarest human will understand and accept that they have nothing.

Only the rarest will understand that success means nothing more than paying back a loan that you have burdened yourself with.

A person that borrows a million pounds to do nothing more than pay a million back has not gained anything. The desire for anything is much the same.

Given you will never make a net profit, would it not be wise to simply avoid the stress and burden of taking the loan, to begin with?

This is not to suggest there is nothing worth doing in this life. One can find beauty, purity, and excitement in everything.

But to do something through the lens of an identity — to make some success of this thing you call your self— is to play a game where you can only ever draw or lose.

Setting out for success is a game you can never truly win.

Failure hurts so much because you are forced to lose or at least question some part of your self when things don’t go as planned.