Category: The Shrink and The Sage

Our culture often seems determined to abolish failure, not by improving the way we do things but simply by getting better at finding reasons to see defeats as victories. All manner of things that used to be classified as failures are now recast as something else: an E is a low pass grade; a business bankruptcy an invaluable learning opportunity. Our motto has become, “If at first you don’t succeed, try to pretend you have.” So, paradoxically, we have become both intolerant and too tolerant of failure, accepting its manifestations by refusing to acknowledge it for what it is.

In the western world, we fear missing out more than we do excess. Living life to the full means filling it as much as possible, and so spaces are hard to tolerate. The radically counter-cultural view is that it is better to have too little than too much.