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0:00:38 With respiratory illness season here, how do we help take care of ourselves?
0:00:39 Practice healthy habits.
0:00:43 Now’s the time to get your flu and updated COVID shots.
0:00:46 They help protect against severe illness and hospitalization.
0:00:52 Also, remember to stay home if you’re sick, cover coughs and sneezes, and clean your hands frequently.
0:00:57 Healthy habits make a difference, helping to protect you and the people in your life.
0:00:58 We can all do our part.
0:01:04 Learn more at healthyhabitsbc.ca, a message from the government of BC.
0:01:08 When things don’t work out the way you want them to, what do you tell people?
0:01:11 And what do you tell yourself?
0:01:17 There’s no shortage of proverbs to offer up when life doesn’t live up to expectations.
0:01:20 Every cloud has a silver lining.
0:01:22 All that glitters is not gold.
0:01:27 When one door closes, another door opens.
0:01:32 You’ve probably heard them all by now.
0:01:37 Most of these maxims are about how failure inevitably leads to success.
0:01:42 And that general way of thinking has really seeped into popular culture.
0:01:49 People often reflect on their failures in interviews, award speeches, and at graduation ceremonies.
0:01:54 And it’s usually an effort to explain or even justify their achievements.
0:01:58 The belief that with failure comes success is very comforting and reassuring.
0:02:05 But what if our focus on success is actually hindering our ability to fully engage with our limitations
0:02:09 and also find humility?
0:02:12 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
0:02:26 [Music]
0:02:28 My guest today is Kostika Radhatan.
0:02:33 He’s a professor at Texas Tech University and honorary research professor of philosophy
0:02:37 at University of Queensland in Australia.
0:02:40 He’s also an editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
0:02:48 And I invited him onto the show to talk about his book, “In Praise of Failure, Four Lessons in Humility.”
0:02:57 It’s a deep and often humorous read, and interestingly, he opens the book with a rather colorful thought experiment.
0:03:05 He asked the reader to imagine they’re on a plane, and suddenly, at high altitude, one of the engines fails.
0:03:08 You can guess what happens next.
0:03:16 It’s a vivid image that, to his mind, captures something fundamental about the human situation.
0:03:23 And that’s where we started our conversation.
0:03:29 The fundamental assumption of the book, the notion that we are caught up between two instantiations of nothingness.
0:03:31 We come from nowhere and we go nowhere.
0:03:36 In cases like this, when the plane engine stops,
0:03:43 we come so close to realizing that fragility, that fundamental precariousness of existence,
0:03:47 and that extraordinary quality of being in this world.
0:03:56 I love thought experiments because they can be very useful at dramatizing banal truths,
0:04:01 truths that have otherwise lost their emotional resonance.
0:04:10 In this case, the plane is the point that the engine failure creates this rupture for everyone on board.
0:04:14 We all have this default mode of being in the world, and that just gets exploded.
0:04:19 Suddenly, if you’re on board, you’re just staring down your own death.
0:04:23 Of course, your own death is always lurking in the distance.
0:04:31 We all know it’s there, but normally, in our default mode, we’re really, really gifted at avoiding.
0:04:33 Thinking about that nothingness.
0:04:38 But in that moment, you’re sort of jerked by the collar and made to stare it down,
0:04:41 and that is a rather unique experience.
0:04:48 We come equipped in this world with lots of devices that prevent us from looking into the abyss.
0:04:52 It’s a very smart way in which we have been designed.
0:04:59 We cannot afford to look too much into the abyss because it’s not taking us anywhere
0:05:06 to live, to be in this world, to be alive, to be able to reproduce and survive.
0:05:12 All that excludes pondering over nothingness and death and finitude and so on.
0:05:19 In a fundamental way, the big philosophical questions are out of the scope of our default mode.
0:05:27 And only in such cases, as we are talking about here, that plain example or similar cases
0:05:35 can we gain a deeper access or a clear vision of what may be like not to be at all.
0:05:40 This way of thinking about failure is so interesting to me.
0:05:47 I think we intuitively imagine failure as the opposite of success.
0:05:53 But you describe it as a disruption of our everyday expectations of the world.
0:05:57 And I’ve never thought about failure as a disconnection in that way.
0:06:00 I’ve never thought about it as an event that gives us a chance,
0:06:08 if we’re mindful or attuned in the right way, to appreciate the fragility of our condition.
0:06:14 And you say that you don’t think we take failure seriously enough.
0:06:17 And I wonder what you mean exactly by that.
0:06:24 I mean that we don’t spend enough time or as much time as we should thinking failure through
0:06:34 because that would turn us into metaphysically sick persons, into unproductive citizens and so on.
0:06:39 Eventually into asocial beings and we prefer not to see it.
0:06:45 We have this bias to make a selection, to see only certain things and to move on.
0:06:51 Those things that help us survive, those things that help us reproduce and spend time in this world,
0:06:59 we stay away instinctively from death, from failure, from destruction, from whatever is dark,
0:07:07 from whatever is abyss, from whatever reminds us of the fundamental void against which our existence takes place.
0:07:11 I mean look, sometimes you can’t ponder over your own death.
0:07:17 Sometimes you just have to get off your ass and mow the yard or take out the trash or pick up your kid from daycare.
0:07:20 That’s just unfeasible to be doing that all the time.
0:07:27 But there are these moments where you’re forced to do that and there’s wisdom to be gained in those moments.
0:07:32 Exactly. It’s my understanding that spiritual life comes from there.
0:07:42 Spirituality doesn’t necessarily mean religion. Of course, we do have a lot of religious life is about spirituality.
0:07:46 But you can have spirituality in philosophy, in science, in the arts and so on.
0:07:54 And my understanding of spirituality is about addressing the big questions, not necessarily formulating an answer,
0:08:01 but just confronting them as long as we do that in the process of doing so, we are doing spiritual stuff.
0:08:08 And in that respect, my book is an attempt at kind of formulating a secular spirituality.
0:08:14 I want to, if we can unpack a little bit, your sort of vision of failure and how you think about failure.
0:08:23 You describe different forms of failure. There’s physical failure, political failure, social failure and biological failure.
0:08:29 And you’ve chosen five historical figures as models of each kind.
0:08:35 And we don’t need to go over all their stories, but why did you choose the people you chose?
0:08:39 I assume that they were all instructive for different reasons.
0:08:45 Right. So there is something boundless about failure. It comes with everything we see around.
0:08:49 There is a failure in the engine that stops working as it should.
0:08:55 There is failure in an institution, in a democratic institution that stops working as it should and so on.
0:09:00 Philosophically, we have a problem. We have one word in English for failure.
0:09:05 But what that word stands for is such a vast, such a vast territory.
0:09:10 But tellingly, in English, we have one word. In other languages, we have multiple words.
0:09:18 So what I tried to do in the book was not so much to go into specifics into, let’s say, design failure.
0:09:25 That’s the job of engineers to study failure in its details, in the view of making better products.
0:09:33 I didn’t go into failures of cognition, of emotion and so on. That’s the job of psychologists.
0:09:41 I took us one step back and looked at failure from the point of view of our experience of it.
0:09:44 So my entry point was the experience of failure.
0:09:49 And that’s where you have this commonality. That’s where it all comes together in some way or another.
0:09:55 Throughout my project, failure is understood as whatever we experience as a disconnection, destruction,
0:10:00 discomfort in the course of our pattern interaction with the world and others.
0:10:04 When something, you know, it sees us to be, or work, or happen as expected.
0:10:10 That’s kind of my operational definition. I chose to deal with those four types of failure.
0:10:17 One is the failure of things, the plane engine that stops. It’s an object. It’s stuff, right?
0:10:22 I’m not involved in the failure of my, you know, freezer or computer.
0:10:26 But whenever that failure happens, it affects me. So I do have an experience.
0:10:33 So if my computer stops working right now, it would be a small disaster because it would interrupt our conversation.
0:10:36 It would create some trouble. It’s not a big deal.
0:10:42 But if the plane engine stops while we are in flight, in mid-flight, that’s much more serious.
0:10:47 That’s the failure of things, right? That’s kind of it’s remote because it’s so impersonal.
0:10:53 It’s so away from what we fundamentally are, but it’s relevant. It’s relevant.
0:10:57 The next circle, as I call it, is political failure.
0:11:05 It’s still remote, but we are, you know, political animals and we are involved in politics where we participate in failure.
0:11:13 We sometimes we are agents of failure. Sometimes we are victims of failure, all that being political failure.
0:11:21 Then the next layer would be social failure. We are social creatures, whether we may choose to stay away from politics,
0:11:30 but it’s very hard to stay away from society. And finally, we have the most intimate of all is biological failure, unavoidable.
0:11:36 It’s there. No matter how much we deceive ourselves, it’s going to catch up with us.
0:11:38 Spoiler alert, we’re all going to die.
0:11:52 Coming up after the break, what can Gandhi’s life teach us about failure?
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0:15:48 Gandhi is such an interesting case study here too.
0:15:50 I mean, you write that he lived in the long shadow of failure.
0:15:59 And in the most obvious sense, you’re right, Gandhi died and the India he dedicated his life to building very much did not come to pass.
0:16:07 Is the lesson there that our political projects like all human things are just imperfect and destined to fail?
0:16:09 Why is that worth remembering?
0:16:16 That’s a good point, actually, because when you do have in Gandhi, he’s celebrated as a saintly figure.
0:16:20 Even the name Mahatma is a reference to holiness.
0:16:29 So even somebody like himself failed politically and failed to bring people together and failed to create a community.
0:16:32 What can we expect from us ordinary people?
0:16:34 But also, there’s so much more in him.
0:16:42 We have, of course, the primary source of my discussion of Gandhi’s failures comes from his own biography.
0:16:43 It’s his own record.
0:16:44 I didn’t invent it.
0:16:47 I didn’t have to study to invent anything.
0:16:48 It’s all there.
0:16:54 He confesses he comes up with this long list of failures from an early age and he had a very interesting approach.
0:17:00 Of course, from some of those failures, from our point of view, look ridiculous that there are no failures at all.
0:17:05 But for himself, you know, by his own standards, they’re huge failure.
0:17:08 At some point, for example, he experiments with meat eating.
0:17:10 So he was vegetarian.
0:17:11 Of course, he was a good Hindu.
0:17:13 And then at some point, there is this temptation.
0:17:16 Some friend invites him to eat meat.
0:17:18 He had a philosophical justification.
0:17:27 Look, meat eating would help us defeat the British because it will make us stronger and we would be better fighters and so on.
0:17:33 The British have managed to occupy us and, you know, take charge of everything because they are meat eaters.
0:17:41 That one thing, that one instance where he had meat kind of poisoned his own life.
0:17:49 And you do have similar instances later on when you do something stupid or some mistake and that would haunt him forever.
0:17:56 I rather like this idea of failure is something that awakens us to the reality that things will go wrong, that we can’t take anything for granted.
0:17:58 And you talk about achieving humility.
0:18:00 And maybe that’s also the point here, right?
0:18:12 Maybe it’s good every now and again to have our vanities and our expectations just flattened by the world.
0:18:14 But that’s just me talking.
0:18:22 I mean, what is this relationship for you between failure and humility and why is humility such a crucial virtue?
0:18:27 It is whether you are a believer or not, you are a religious person or not.
0:18:31 Humility remains a major virtue.
0:18:37 We can call it virtue or it can be, we can call it attitude.
0:18:44 Primarily, at the very basic level, humility is about understanding.
0:18:54 Moral teachers and religious figures would say it’s a sin to be arrogant, to be proud, that you have to strive to be humble.
0:18:56 In that respect, it’s a religious virtue.
0:18:58 That’s, of course, that’s true.
0:19:05 But more importantly, in my reading, humility has an epistemic value.
0:19:09 It helps us better understand the world.
0:19:12 It helps us better understand our situation in the world.
0:19:30 Why? Because when we are humble, when we achieve, indeed, achieve humanity, we manage to reduce all those projections of power, of arrogance, of dominion, of dominance over others, over the world around.
0:19:38 All those projections form some kind of screen between us and the world, between us and the things we are trying to understand.
0:19:45 And when that screen is removed, we finally have access to things as they are, as opposed to as we like them to be.
0:19:47 So that’s the whole thing.
0:19:48 We are proud.
0:19:52 We have our own ambitions, our own dreams, our own desires.
0:20:01 We tend to see the world in some kind of colored fashion, not as it is, but as we like it to be.
0:20:02 And that, of course, that’s wrong.
0:20:04 That’s a misrepresentation.
0:20:05 That’s a failure.
0:20:08 Well, humility is also a political virtue for you, right?
0:20:20 I mean, you say that democracy fails when it doesn’t make enough room for failure, when people can’t help seeing themselves as better than they are.
0:20:22 What do you mean there?
0:20:22 Right.
0:20:28 So one of the assumptions in the book is that we are born with this power instinct.
0:20:36 We are animals and political animals striving to assert ourselves against others, against the world.
0:20:37 That’s what life is all about, right?
0:20:38 This is struggle.
0:20:41 This is self-continual self-assertion.
0:20:46 As we become enlightened as we should, right?
0:20:49 We realize that that’s not the way to go.
0:20:50 We need this kind of humility.
0:20:54 We need to understand that we are one among others.
0:20:56 We have limited faculties.
0:20:58 We have a limited comprehension.
0:21:07 And if we are to live in a police, in a city with others, we have to kind of take a step back and recognize our own finitude.
0:21:11 We are finite creatures in all kinds of ways.
0:21:14 Politically speaking, we play a very small part.
0:21:25 And in a democratic society, it’s crucially in my reading for every single individual to have the sense of his or her own humanity.
0:21:28 I’m just playing a small part.
0:21:29 I make mistakes all the time.
0:21:33 That other guy may know things better than I do.
0:21:40 You have to be always ready to admit that you are wrong, which is difficult.
0:21:40 It is.
0:21:45 One thing Albert can do, and we’ve done an episode on him before.
0:21:54 One thing he convinced me of was that more harm has come into the world through people who were absolutely convinced that they were right, that they had the truth.
0:21:59 In other words, from people utterly lacking in humility.
0:22:00 Oh, yeah.
0:22:01 Oh, yeah.
0:22:04 It’s something that we are facing right now.
0:22:13 It’s regardless of our personal political affiliations, we tend to see the other party, the other side as wrong.
0:22:19 We are convinced that only our beliefs, our sympathies, our political preferences are the right ones.
0:22:29 And whatever comes from the other side is toxic, is wrong, is a threat to democracy, which leads us to such a crisis of democracy.
0:22:31 There may be truth on the other side.
0:22:38 Obviously, we have our own preferences, and yet we have to stay open because nobody has a monopoly.
0:22:46 And I think it’s very hard to talk about failure without also talking about success, since neither concept is intelligible without the other.
0:22:52 Do you think we worship success too much in this culture?
0:22:53 I think so.
0:22:54 I think so.
0:22:56 There has to be a balance.
0:23:06 If we look at the past and other cultures, I think different cultures have achieved a better balance.
0:23:09 What I mean is that, of course, we do need success.
0:23:12 We need to be successful because otherwise it’s extremely frustrating.
0:23:15 It’s unhealthy to experience only failure.
0:23:17 It goes against the human nature.
0:23:20 It’s going to drive us crazy.
0:23:33 But if all our lives, practical lives, social lives, political lives, intellectual lives, are obsessed with success, we miss something important about what it means to be human.
0:23:44 Because it’s kind of it takes its blinds us, all that obsession blinds us and prevents us from seeing the bigger picture to seeing our condition in the world.
0:23:46 What’s really important?
0:23:56 So we do have in this country, for example, this obsession with rankings, with all kinds of indicators of status.
0:24:02 If you start believing in that and if you start acting in response to that, it takes away your life.
0:24:04 You become alienated from yourself.
0:24:07 You stop paying attention to what’s really important.
0:24:14 And what you want to do is just to be on top, to go to the best university possible, to have the most expensive car and so on.
0:24:18 And that’s damaging, spiritually damaging.
0:24:23 Well, I mean, I think we also have a very superficial and narrow definition of success.
0:24:29 You know, we all think we know what success and failure look like because we all know the markers of success in this culture.
0:24:37 But if those markers are wrong or unwise, then our stories about success and failure are leading us astray.
0:24:41 And I think that’s part of what you’re saying here, at least in the book.
0:24:50 Right, because the definitions of failure and success, of social failure and social success are products of a certain system.
0:24:55 Each society generates its own understandings of social and failure and success.
0:25:01 In ancient Greece, they would have a very different understanding of very different definitions, very different criteria and so on.
0:25:05 In ancient China, obviously, they would be doing something different.
0:25:12 So our own comes with its own, you know, projections and definitions and representations.
0:25:27 And that’s not separated from the fundamental presuppositions of our society, where the most important things are profit, profit making, production, consumption, kind of the indefinite growth of economic growth.
0:25:39 So if we take that into account, we realize that this societal push to succeed, to be optimistic about success, to hope that tomorrow there are going to be a better day and so on,
0:25:42 has something to do with the fundamental assumptions of our society.
0:25:51 Where, for example, it’s very important for banks to have clients and those clients, you know, they take loans and they have to pay them back.
0:25:55 And behind you have this culture of optimism and culture of success.
0:25:59 We have this general push towards a better future, right?
0:26:04 It’s always a better future, which is kind of a religion right now here.
0:26:13 If we all believe in a better tomorrow, it makes us better consumers, better citizens, better participants to the political project.
0:26:17 And of course, there is so much to lose in the process.
0:26:19 We may eventually lose our soul.
0:26:20 But what’s the alternative, right?
0:26:23 I mean, no one wants to believe in a shittier tomorrow, right?
0:26:28 I mean, we’ve still got to get out of bed in the morning.
0:26:34 We have, if you go back in the past, you have societies where, for example, the best things happen in the past.
0:26:40 You have a golden age and what the present is lived in the shadow of that golden age.
0:26:51 What we have here is some kind of echo of a strong Christian culture, Judeo-Christian culture, where the coming of a Messiah, the second coming of Jesus Christ,
0:26:56 was a lived experience, was the most important religious experience that people have.
0:27:03 Now, of course, we don’t have, we live in a secularized society, but we still believe in this coming of a better future.
0:27:05 So it’s coming from that place.
0:27:08 But in the process, we stop being believers.
0:27:13 We no longer believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ, you know, most of us.
0:27:21 But we do believe in the coming of a better prophets, of better, you know, car brands and so on, better technology.
0:27:24 That will improve our lives of better days in general.
0:27:26 Yeah.
0:27:29 Well, why do you think most of us want to succeed so badly?
0:27:35 You know, I realize that question may sound dumb and rhetorical, but bear with me because I don’t think it is.
0:27:44 You know, what I’m getting at is I don’t think most of us try to succeed because we believe there’s some inherent virtue in it.
0:27:54 I think we’re trying madly to succeed because it’s a means to recognition and status and reward.
0:28:01 It’s how we get the people around us to tell us that we’re good and smart and worthy.
0:28:06 And that relates to failure because this is partly why we’re so terrified of failing, right?
0:28:10 We don’t want to be judged as bad or low status or deficient.
0:28:12 I understand those kinds of fears.
0:28:13 I mean, I share them.
0:28:15 I mean, who doesn’t get that?
0:28:23 But it is worth reflecting on just how much those feelings guide our lives and what the cost of that is.
0:28:28 That’s an excellent point in our society, which worships success.
0:28:33 We want to succeed because we don’t want to stand out in a bad way.
0:28:42 I have a chapter, as you know, in the book where Choran, Emil Choran, a Romanian-born French philosopher, a brilliant writer, a very successful writer in a way,
0:28:45 chooses the life of a parasite in Paris.
0:28:51 He moves from Romanian to Paris and chooses to do nothing, you know, lives like a beggar.
0:28:58 All he does is thinking through his own condition, the condition of the society in which he lives and so on.
0:29:08 And the end result is a body of work, an extremely interesting body of work, which comes with metaphysical depth, with stylistic beauty and so on.
0:29:18 So to go back to your question is the pressure to succeed is, in fact, at its core, a pressure to conform to societal norms.
0:29:27 I don’t want race to succeed as I want to be with others, to be accepted, just as you said, not to stand out in a bad, shameful way.
0:29:29 It’s not really success in itself.
0:29:37 It’s the fear of marginalization, the fear of becoming an outcast, of solitude, the whole conversation of failure and success.
0:29:46 It should be connected to a larger conversation about society, about social standards, social pressures, and so on.
0:29:50 Yeah, you know, something you take on in the book and I love that you do this.
0:29:57 Is this effort to rebrand failure as a quote stepping stone to success?
0:30:00 And this is something you see this trope all over the place.
0:30:03 You see it in the tech world, you find it in self-help literature.
0:30:05 You hear it in sports a lot.
0:30:09 Why is that mode of thinking just wrong-headed for you?
0:30:12 Because it doesn’t really deal with failure.
0:30:15 Really, it’s just another conversation about success.
0:30:19 Because fundamentally, failure is unpleasant, is ugly, is terrible.
0:30:24 Failure at its core is something profoundly unpleasant to experience.
0:30:36 And what those people, you know, talking about failure as a stepping stone to success are doing is sugarcoating, turning it into a conversation about success.
0:30:38 We don’t like to talk about death.
0:30:40 We don’t like to talk about failure.
0:30:43 We don’t like to talk about many unpleasant things.
0:30:56 But by having certain ways of dealing with that by sugarcoating and reusing a certain kind of language, we give the impression that we’ve dealt with a problem where we haven’t actually.
0:30:59 We have the sheer fact that we fail.
0:31:00 There is failure out there.
0:31:05 And those people in all those self-help gurus and so on, they cannot ignore the fact.
0:31:15 What they do instead, they hijack the conversation and they shift it and they move it into a place where it’s made more pleasant.
0:31:18 Ordinarily, we don’t want to hear unpleasant things.
0:31:21 We don’t buy a movie ticket to watch a tragedy.
0:31:27 We want to go in a movie theater and have a good time and be entertained.
0:31:36 That’s why those people, you know, self-help writers and so on, they may be well-meaning and they may be helpful in some way.
0:31:49 But at the end of the day, I don’t think they help us too much because they manage to avoid what’s really at stake, the dark nature of failure, the dark truth that the human condition is all about.
0:31:58 I mean, I guess it’s part of this notion that the whole point of life is to just get closer and closer to perfection and any mishaps, any failures along the way.
0:32:00 Well, those are just diversions.
0:32:12 Whereas what you’re saying, no, no, that’s actually a really, really essential part of living as the flawed creatures that we are and turning away from that is a mistake.
0:32:16 Exactly. It’s a matter of framing how you look at the world.
0:32:25 There are different ways. So we have, for example, in some very serious religious traditions, spiritual, intellectual and religious traditions like Buddhism.
0:32:29 The very first truth of Buddhism is life is suffering.
0:32:34 It’s a very brutal, you know, opening to leave is to suffer, right?
0:32:41 We have in Christianity, similarly, the episode in the Garden of Eden was relatively brief.
0:32:44 We don’t know much because in that place, you don’t have stories.
0:32:48 And then we have the fall, the human history starts with the fall.
0:32:59 So my reading of failure is an attempt to connect with those traditions, which I consider deeper, Buddhism and Christianity and others.
0:33:05 Even if my own position is secular, it’s not necessarily religious, doesn’t exclude religion, but it’s not necessarily religious.
0:33:11 My framing is of such a nature that the world is fundamentally a failed project.
0:33:15 We come from nothing, we return to nothingness.
0:33:24 We are meant to die, no matter how much we work on this, how much we pay for better medicine and better technology and so on.
0:33:28 We all end up there. Failure is an accident.
0:33:33 Whatever is good in our lives, whatever is positive is something that we extract from failure.
0:33:38 We extract from nothingness. We extract from manylessness and so on.
0:33:48 So it kind of gives us, in a sense, it gives us more agency because I’m surrounded with misfortune and so on.
0:33:54 We are surrounded with bad things, and yet we manage to make something that’s livable.
0:34:00 We create a space where we can live a decent life, but that takes more effort.
0:34:08 If the world is bad and I manage to make a good life within this world, it takes an effort, it takes responsibility, it takes lots of things.
0:34:13 Whereas the other position, you know, the default mode, as you said, is optimistic.
0:34:15 You don’t have to do much.
0:34:28 If optimism is easy, why should we engage with failure?
0:34:31 Is there something positive to gain from it?
0:34:33 We’ll discuss after one more quick break.
0:34:38 [Music]
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0:36:00 Programming our thermostat to 17 degrees when we’re out at work or asleep.
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0:36:08 Ooh, conserve energy and save money?
0:36:10 Maybe to buy those matching winter jackets?
0:36:12 Uh, no.
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0:36:22 Matching track suits?
0:36:23 Please, no.
0:36:39 Do you think of this as a gloomy pessimistic book?
0:36:41 I don’t think it is.
0:36:45 Maybe on a superficial reading, I guess it could be seen that way.
0:36:49 But do you self-consciously think of it as dark and pessimistic?
0:36:56 No, actually, no. In part because of the stories I use, those are sometimes even funny stories.
0:37:02 Yeah, I don’t think it’s dark at all, but this is a good time to kind of come back to this idea of biological failure.
0:37:07 Or this idea that our death is like the ultimate failure, right?
0:37:09 And I definitely hear what you’re saying, right?
0:37:15 We are quite literally born into a losing struggle.
0:37:20 Life is a definitional failure in the sense that we start to die the second we’re born.
0:37:25 But life is not necessarily a failure just because it ends, right?
0:37:28 Yes, you can look at it that way.
0:37:29 Because I don’t think it is.
0:37:33 One of the assumptions of the book is failure is a fluid thing.
0:37:36 It’s kind of dynamic.
0:37:39 Let’s take that example you just used.
0:37:46 Life is not necessarily a failure when doctors have to indicate the cause of death or somebody.
0:37:48 They would use this language.
0:37:50 It may be a slip, a slip of tongue.
0:37:52 They use organ failure.
0:37:58 The assumption somehow, it’s an unconscious assumption, unspoken, is that we may, in principle,
0:38:03 we may work for our organs, our bodies, may work indefinitely.
0:38:07 Should we just find the right equipment, the better technology, the better treatment?
0:38:12 Even in the medical profession, this dream of an indefinite life.
0:38:15 But then they would come up with the idea of failure.
0:38:18 It’s interesting how it kind of slips in.
0:38:26 Again, it’s a back and forth because it’s so much is involved, emotions and understanding and enlightenment and so on.
0:38:28 It’s a very individual, very private matter.
0:38:41 So much depends when we are having this conversation on the individual, on our possessions as individuals, on what we’ve experienced, on what we internalized, on the lives we’ve lived and so on.
0:38:53 So it’s kind of, it’s very difficult to have a detached purely theoretical discussions on failure because it’s one of those topics in which everything is involved, our whole beings.
0:38:56 When we talk about love, for example, we have a similar situation.
0:39:07 We cannot really talk about love without bringing in all the personal baggage, all the loves we had or the betrayers, all the things that come with love and so on.
0:39:24 Yeah, I guess I believe, and maybe you do too, that we should keep an eye on our mortality because living a meaningful, worthwhile life means accepting the truth of our condition while also, in some sense, rebelling against it.
0:39:36 This is Camu and the mythososophist, right, this idea that the world only appears absurd or meaningless because we demand that it have some sort of higher meaning.
0:39:46 But just because it doesn’t, doesn’t mean it’s meaningless, it just means it is on us to make it meaningful, to live and create and affirm, right?
0:39:49 These things, just because they don’t last forever, doesn’t mean they’re not worth doing.
0:39:55 In fact, because they won’t last forever is partly what makes it so meaningful and special in the first place.
0:40:05 I like that point. It’s not that, you know, by dying, we fail, right? Our life is a failed life because one day we’ll die.
0:40:19 When we don’t die properly, when we don’t learn how to die, when we don’t understand our mortality properly, when we don’t come to terms with our mortality well before the event happens to us,
0:40:28 this kind of understanding that’s so demanding, so important that we may need a different term, we call it enlightenment.
0:40:31 That’s what you get in those spiritual traditions.
0:40:41 Those people, you know, the Zen masters and so on, the enlightened people of Sufism and so on, didn’t live failed lives because they died, I would say.
0:40:52 Whenever that moment came for them, they were better equipped to grasp it, to make sense of it, to see it as some kind of culmination of their project rather than as a misfortune, right?
0:41:03 Coming to terms with mortality, making sense of death, you know, well before it happens, that help us not necessarily die better, that will happen, but also live better.
0:41:06 Have you ever read Nietzsche’s riff on sand castles?
0:41:08 Which is where?
0:41:20 God, I don’t remember where this is or what book this is in, but he has this idea that you can gauge someone’s relationship to time by looking at how they build a sand castle.
0:41:22 And he has these like three different examples, right?
0:41:28 One guy will bitch about the fact that the waves are just going to come wash it away.
0:41:31 Maybe he’ll build a sand castle, but he’ll grumble along the way, right?
0:41:35 And another guy, well, he won’t even build it at all because why the hell would you bother, right?
0:41:39 The tide’s just going to come in and destroy it anyway, so the hell with it.
0:41:47 And then there’s this third person who throws himself into building a sand castle joyously and with passion, knowing it’s going to be washed away by the tide.
0:41:54 But he builds anyway and builds with a smile on his face and like that is supposed to be this kind of paragon of what it is to like live an affirmative life.
0:42:04 You know that annihilation is the ultimate endpoint for all of us, but you still go on, you still throw yourself into the world despite it.
0:42:12 Excellent. That’s exactly the point of what you have in Japan, but also in Korea, elsewhere, the cherry blossom festival.
0:42:13 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:42:19 You celebrate, you know, the splendor, the beauty, the ultimate beauty of life.
0:42:23 And at the very same time, you know that tomorrow is not going to be there.
0:42:28 Just like Nietzsche’s sand castle, it’s there in all its splendor.
0:42:31 And yet, you know, it’s not going to last.
0:42:32 It’s gone tomorrow.
0:42:33 It will fail.
0:42:40 It will fail. Yeah, so you have that embedded failure in the process and you ignore it and yet you cannot ignore it.
0:42:45 Yeah, you write in the book that we are creatures of chance to use your phrase.
0:42:47 We’re born into this cosmic farce, right?
0:42:53 But our failures give us these these insights into our existence.
0:43:00 And you argue that we realize the magnitude of our accomplishments in spite of all these harsh realities.
0:43:04 You know, you say, we get the joke.
0:43:05 What’s the joke?
0:43:09 Is the joke that we’re here at all, that we’re conscious enough to know it’s a losing game,
0:43:12 but we get to play it with a smile on our faces anyway?
0:43:19 Yeah, the joke is that you have this sense of cosmic farce.
0:43:21 You come into this world fully aware.
0:43:27 We grow up and one day we become fully aware of the world and we push further.
0:43:29 We understand that we are creatures of chance.
0:43:33 We understand that we are just nothing, nothing really.
0:43:35 We are next to nothing.
0:43:37 And that’s a big joke, right?
0:43:43 Why should we be here in the first place if we we we are so insubstantial, if we are so flitting?
0:43:48 If we don’t mean anything, why should we be brought into this world?
0:43:54 By understanding the situation, by getting the joke, you somehow I’m not saying we come to master the situation.
0:43:56 That’s maybe too much.
0:43:59 But we cannot afford to smile, you know, complicit.
0:44:07 At the end, you describe the moment we wake up every morning where we don’t quite have our bearings yet.
0:44:10 We’re not quite thinking yet.
0:44:14 And very quickly, our memories start to return.
0:44:22 We start thinking about what we’re going to eat for breakfast, what we got to do that day or various obligations.
0:44:33 And the story of us begins to get retold and reinforced in our minds as we perform our life as it is.
0:44:38 Why is this the most significant moment of every day for you?
0:44:39 I just love this thought.
0:44:48 It is because that’s when we realize we have this overwhelming insight that to be is to be able to tell a story.
0:44:55 Every morning we become ourselves only at the moment when we remember who we are in a kind of articulate manner.
0:44:59 And more exactly when we are able to tell the story of who we are.
0:45:05 So we exist only to the extent that we can tell the story of our existence.
0:45:10 And we have that at the very end because that custom allied on the whole project.
0:45:13 It’s a final couple of pages of the book.
0:45:20 It gives you the key, I would say, to the whole project because it highlights the importance of storytelling.
0:45:22 In the end, it’s all about storytelling.
0:45:24 It’s how we manage to tell our story.
0:45:29 We can give us a meaning to the extent that we can tell a good story about us.
0:45:31 Yeah, you’re right.
0:45:36 It is just brief, brief flash of a moment.
0:45:42 But for that little fraction of a moment, we are kind of a blank slate.
0:45:47 And I could not agree more that we are, and I think you say this explicitly in the book,
0:45:50 that we are fundamentally storytelling creatures.
0:45:56 We narrate our way into meaning every day and we narrate our way into humility
0:46:01 and we narrate our way into and out of success and into and out of failure every day.
0:46:06 All of which is to say it really doesn’t matter which stories we tell ourselves.
0:46:07 So we should choose them wisely.
0:46:11 Right. That should make us more responsible.
0:46:21 Placing failure at the core of who we are and, in fact, turns us or should turn us into more capable agents.
0:46:23 It should give us more agency.
0:46:29 It sounds paradoxical, but I think I’m right here because if I admit those failures,
0:46:35 if I see where I fail, whatever is wrong, whatever is bad that happens to me and around me,
0:46:37 I have more stuff to do.
0:46:39 There is more space I can fill.
0:46:41 Really, there is room for improvement.
0:46:42 There is room for storytelling.
0:46:44 I have more stuff to do.
0:46:50 If my life story is only a story of success, all the good things and so on.
0:46:53 Really, that leaves me out, most of me out.
0:46:54 It’s paradoxical.
0:47:01 I’m just the, you know, the happy, the fortunate beneficiary of this long chain of blessings and successes and so on.
0:47:06 And there’s not much for me to do, right, except say yes and sure.
0:47:15 But, in fact, when we make a conscious decision to recognize failure in the world and in our lives, that empowers us.
0:47:17 Yeah, I mean, I guess bringing it back to Camu here at the end, right?
0:47:22 This is the image of Sisyphus that he wants us to grasp onto, right?
0:47:24 This Sisyphus is not a failure.
0:47:28 Life is not pointless just because that boulder rolls back down the hill.
0:47:29 Hell no, right?
0:47:33 No, you go back down, you make that boulder your own and you push it back up again, right?
0:47:35 And there’s meaning in that pushing.
0:47:38 And that’s also a counterintuitive way to think about Sisyphus.
0:47:41 But I think it aligns with what you’re saying here.
0:47:44 And I think it’s good and true.
0:47:44 Excellent.
0:47:49 I mean, I have Camus in the book, as you know, but not that particular image.
0:47:54 But as you are talking about this, I realize how much truth there is in that.
0:47:59 So probably in the back of my mind, there was this Camusian insight working there.
0:48:00 I love it.
0:48:06 Again, the book is “In Praise of Failure, Four Lessons in Humility.”
0:48:08 Costica Brataton, thank you so much for being here.
0:48:11 I love these kinds of conversations.
0:48:12 Thank you so much for having me, Sean.
0:48:33 [MUSIC PLAYING]
0:48:35 Patrick Boyd engineered this episode.
0:48:37 It was edited by A.M. Hall.
0:48:41 And Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:48:44 As always, let us know what you think about this one.
0:48:48 Was it a success, a failure, somewhere in between?
0:48:53 Send us an email and let us know at thegrayarea@vox.com.
0:48:57 And if you appreciated this episode, please share it with your friends on all the social.
0:49:06 [MUSIC PLAYING]
0:49:09 (gentle music)
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0:00:39 Practice healthy habits.
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0:00:52 Also, remember to stay home if you’re sick, cover coughs and sneezes, and clean your hands frequently.
0:00:57 Healthy habits make a difference, helping to protect you and the people in your life.
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0:01:08 When things don’t work out the way you want them to, what do you tell people?
0:01:11 And what do you tell yourself?
0:01:17 There’s no shortage of proverbs to offer up when life doesn’t live up to expectations.
0:01:20 Every cloud has a silver lining.
0:01:22 All that glitters is not gold.
0:01:27 When one door closes, another door opens.
0:01:32 You’ve probably heard them all by now.
0:01:37 Most of these maxims are about how failure inevitably leads to success.
0:01:42 And that general way of thinking has really seeped into popular culture.
0:01:49 People often reflect on their failures in interviews, award speeches, and at graduation ceremonies.
0:01:54 And it’s usually an effort to explain or even justify their achievements.
0:01:58 The belief that with failure comes success is very comforting and reassuring.
0:02:05 But what if our focus on success is actually hindering our ability to fully engage with our limitations
0:02:09 and also find humility?
0:02:12 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
0:02:26 [Music]
0:02:28 My guest today is Kostika Radhatan.
0:02:33 He’s a professor at Texas Tech University and honorary research professor of philosophy
0:02:37 at University of Queensland in Australia.
0:02:40 He’s also an editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
0:02:48 And I invited him onto the show to talk about his book, “In Praise of Failure, Four Lessons in Humility.”
0:02:57 It’s a deep and often humorous read, and interestingly, he opens the book with a rather colorful thought experiment.
0:03:05 He asked the reader to imagine they’re on a plane, and suddenly, at high altitude, one of the engines fails.
0:03:08 You can guess what happens next.
0:03:16 It’s a vivid image that, to his mind, captures something fundamental about the human situation.
0:03:23 And that’s where we started our conversation.
0:03:29 The fundamental assumption of the book, the notion that we are caught up between two instantiations of nothingness.
0:03:31 We come from nowhere and we go nowhere.
0:03:36 In cases like this, when the plane engine stops,
0:03:43 we come so close to realizing that fragility, that fundamental precariousness of existence,
0:03:47 and that extraordinary quality of being in this world.
0:03:56 I love thought experiments because they can be very useful at dramatizing banal truths,
0:04:01 truths that have otherwise lost their emotional resonance.
0:04:10 In this case, the plane is the point that the engine failure creates this rupture for everyone on board.
0:04:14 We all have this default mode of being in the world, and that just gets exploded.
0:04:19 Suddenly, if you’re on board, you’re just staring down your own death.
0:04:23 Of course, your own death is always lurking in the distance.
0:04:31 We all know it’s there, but normally, in our default mode, we’re really, really gifted at avoiding.
0:04:33 Thinking about that nothingness.
0:04:38 But in that moment, you’re sort of jerked by the collar and made to stare it down,
0:04:41 and that is a rather unique experience.
0:04:48 We come equipped in this world with lots of devices that prevent us from looking into the abyss.
0:04:52 It’s a very smart way in which we have been designed.
0:04:59 We cannot afford to look too much into the abyss because it’s not taking us anywhere
0:05:06 to live, to be in this world, to be alive, to be able to reproduce and survive.
0:05:12 All that excludes pondering over nothingness and death and finitude and so on.
0:05:19 In a fundamental way, the big philosophical questions are out of the scope of our default mode.
0:05:27 And only in such cases, as we are talking about here, that plain example or similar cases
0:05:35 can we gain a deeper access or a clear vision of what may be like not to be at all.
0:05:40 This way of thinking about failure is so interesting to me.
0:05:47 I think we intuitively imagine failure as the opposite of success.
0:05:53 But you describe it as a disruption of our everyday expectations of the world.
0:05:57 And I’ve never thought about failure as a disconnection in that way.
0:06:00 I’ve never thought about it as an event that gives us a chance,
0:06:08 if we’re mindful or attuned in the right way, to appreciate the fragility of our condition.
0:06:14 And you say that you don’t think we take failure seriously enough.
0:06:17 And I wonder what you mean exactly by that.
0:06:24 I mean that we don’t spend enough time or as much time as we should thinking failure through
0:06:34 because that would turn us into metaphysically sick persons, into unproductive citizens and so on.
0:06:39 Eventually into asocial beings and we prefer not to see it.
0:06:45 We have this bias to make a selection, to see only certain things and to move on.
0:06:51 Those things that help us survive, those things that help us reproduce and spend time in this world,
0:06:59 we stay away instinctively from death, from failure, from destruction, from whatever is dark,
0:07:07 from whatever is abyss, from whatever reminds us of the fundamental void against which our existence takes place.
0:07:11 I mean look, sometimes you can’t ponder over your own death.
0:07:17 Sometimes you just have to get off your ass and mow the yard or take out the trash or pick up your kid from daycare.
0:07:20 That’s just unfeasible to be doing that all the time.
0:07:27 But there are these moments where you’re forced to do that and there’s wisdom to be gained in those moments.
0:07:32 Exactly. It’s my understanding that spiritual life comes from there.
0:07:42 Spirituality doesn’t necessarily mean religion. Of course, we do have a lot of religious life is about spirituality.
0:07:46 But you can have spirituality in philosophy, in science, in the arts and so on.
0:07:54 And my understanding of spirituality is about addressing the big questions, not necessarily formulating an answer,
0:08:01 but just confronting them as long as we do that in the process of doing so, we are doing spiritual stuff.
0:08:08 And in that respect, my book is an attempt at kind of formulating a secular spirituality.
0:08:14 I want to, if we can unpack a little bit, your sort of vision of failure and how you think about failure.
0:08:23 You describe different forms of failure. There’s physical failure, political failure, social failure and biological failure.
0:08:29 And you’ve chosen five historical figures as models of each kind.
0:08:35 And we don’t need to go over all their stories, but why did you choose the people you chose?
0:08:39 I assume that they were all instructive for different reasons.
0:08:45 Right. So there is something boundless about failure. It comes with everything we see around.
0:08:49 There is a failure in the engine that stops working as it should.
0:08:55 There is failure in an institution, in a democratic institution that stops working as it should and so on.
0:09:00 Philosophically, we have a problem. We have one word in English for failure.
0:09:05 But what that word stands for is such a vast, such a vast territory.
0:09:10 But tellingly, in English, we have one word. In other languages, we have multiple words.
0:09:18 So what I tried to do in the book was not so much to go into specifics into, let’s say, design failure.
0:09:25 That’s the job of engineers to study failure in its details, in the view of making better products.
0:09:33 I didn’t go into failures of cognition, of emotion and so on. That’s the job of psychologists.
0:09:41 I took us one step back and looked at failure from the point of view of our experience of it.
0:09:44 So my entry point was the experience of failure.
0:09:49 And that’s where you have this commonality. That’s where it all comes together in some way or another.
0:09:55 Throughout my project, failure is understood as whatever we experience as a disconnection, destruction,
0:10:00 discomfort in the course of our pattern interaction with the world and others.
0:10:04 When something, you know, it sees us to be, or work, or happen as expected.
0:10:10 That’s kind of my operational definition. I chose to deal with those four types of failure.
0:10:17 One is the failure of things, the plane engine that stops. It’s an object. It’s stuff, right?
0:10:22 I’m not involved in the failure of my, you know, freezer or computer.
0:10:26 But whenever that failure happens, it affects me. So I do have an experience.
0:10:33 So if my computer stops working right now, it would be a small disaster because it would interrupt our conversation.
0:10:36 It would create some trouble. It’s not a big deal.
0:10:42 But if the plane engine stops while we are in flight, in mid-flight, that’s much more serious.
0:10:47 That’s the failure of things, right? That’s kind of it’s remote because it’s so impersonal.
0:10:53 It’s so away from what we fundamentally are, but it’s relevant. It’s relevant.
0:10:57 The next circle, as I call it, is political failure.
0:11:05 It’s still remote, but we are, you know, political animals and we are involved in politics where we participate in failure.
0:11:13 We sometimes we are agents of failure. Sometimes we are victims of failure, all that being political failure.
0:11:21 Then the next layer would be social failure. We are social creatures, whether we may choose to stay away from politics,
0:11:30 but it’s very hard to stay away from society. And finally, we have the most intimate of all is biological failure, unavoidable.
0:11:36 It’s there. No matter how much we deceive ourselves, it’s going to catch up with us.
0:11:38 Spoiler alert, we’re all going to die.
0:11:52 Coming up after the break, what can Gandhi’s life teach us about failure?
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0:15:48 Gandhi is such an interesting case study here too.
0:15:50 I mean, you write that he lived in the long shadow of failure.
0:15:59 And in the most obvious sense, you’re right, Gandhi died and the India he dedicated his life to building very much did not come to pass.
0:16:07 Is the lesson there that our political projects like all human things are just imperfect and destined to fail?
0:16:09 Why is that worth remembering?
0:16:16 That’s a good point, actually, because when you do have in Gandhi, he’s celebrated as a saintly figure.
0:16:20 Even the name Mahatma is a reference to holiness.
0:16:29 So even somebody like himself failed politically and failed to bring people together and failed to create a community.
0:16:32 What can we expect from us ordinary people?
0:16:34 But also, there’s so much more in him.
0:16:42 We have, of course, the primary source of my discussion of Gandhi’s failures comes from his own biography.
0:16:43 It’s his own record.
0:16:44 I didn’t invent it.
0:16:47 I didn’t have to study to invent anything.
0:16:48 It’s all there.
0:16:54 He confesses he comes up with this long list of failures from an early age and he had a very interesting approach.
0:17:00 Of course, from some of those failures, from our point of view, look ridiculous that there are no failures at all.
0:17:05 But for himself, you know, by his own standards, they’re huge failure.
0:17:08 At some point, for example, he experiments with meat eating.
0:17:10 So he was vegetarian.
0:17:11 Of course, he was a good Hindu.
0:17:13 And then at some point, there is this temptation.
0:17:16 Some friend invites him to eat meat.
0:17:18 He had a philosophical justification.
0:17:27 Look, meat eating would help us defeat the British because it will make us stronger and we would be better fighters and so on.
0:17:33 The British have managed to occupy us and, you know, take charge of everything because they are meat eaters.
0:17:41 That one thing, that one instance where he had meat kind of poisoned his own life.
0:17:49 And you do have similar instances later on when you do something stupid or some mistake and that would haunt him forever.
0:17:56 I rather like this idea of failure is something that awakens us to the reality that things will go wrong, that we can’t take anything for granted.
0:17:58 And you talk about achieving humility.
0:18:00 And maybe that’s also the point here, right?
0:18:12 Maybe it’s good every now and again to have our vanities and our expectations just flattened by the world.
0:18:14 But that’s just me talking.
0:18:22 I mean, what is this relationship for you between failure and humility and why is humility such a crucial virtue?
0:18:27 It is whether you are a believer or not, you are a religious person or not.
0:18:31 Humility remains a major virtue.
0:18:37 We can call it virtue or it can be, we can call it attitude.
0:18:44 Primarily, at the very basic level, humility is about understanding.
0:18:54 Moral teachers and religious figures would say it’s a sin to be arrogant, to be proud, that you have to strive to be humble.
0:18:56 In that respect, it’s a religious virtue.
0:18:58 That’s, of course, that’s true.
0:19:05 But more importantly, in my reading, humility has an epistemic value.
0:19:09 It helps us better understand the world.
0:19:12 It helps us better understand our situation in the world.
0:19:30 Why? Because when we are humble, when we achieve, indeed, achieve humanity, we manage to reduce all those projections of power, of arrogance, of dominion, of dominance over others, over the world around.
0:19:38 All those projections form some kind of screen between us and the world, between us and the things we are trying to understand.
0:19:45 And when that screen is removed, we finally have access to things as they are, as opposed to as we like them to be.
0:19:47 So that’s the whole thing.
0:19:48 We are proud.
0:19:52 We have our own ambitions, our own dreams, our own desires.
0:20:01 We tend to see the world in some kind of colored fashion, not as it is, but as we like it to be.
0:20:02 And that, of course, that’s wrong.
0:20:04 That’s a misrepresentation.
0:20:05 That’s a failure.
0:20:08 Well, humility is also a political virtue for you, right?
0:20:20 I mean, you say that democracy fails when it doesn’t make enough room for failure, when people can’t help seeing themselves as better than they are.
0:20:22 What do you mean there?
0:20:22 Right.
0:20:28 So one of the assumptions in the book is that we are born with this power instinct.
0:20:36 We are animals and political animals striving to assert ourselves against others, against the world.
0:20:37 That’s what life is all about, right?
0:20:38 This is struggle.
0:20:41 This is self-continual self-assertion.
0:20:46 As we become enlightened as we should, right?
0:20:49 We realize that that’s not the way to go.
0:20:50 We need this kind of humility.
0:20:54 We need to understand that we are one among others.
0:20:56 We have limited faculties.
0:20:58 We have a limited comprehension.
0:21:07 And if we are to live in a police, in a city with others, we have to kind of take a step back and recognize our own finitude.
0:21:11 We are finite creatures in all kinds of ways.
0:21:14 Politically speaking, we play a very small part.
0:21:25 And in a democratic society, it’s crucially in my reading for every single individual to have the sense of his or her own humanity.
0:21:28 I’m just playing a small part.
0:21:29 I make mistakes all the time.
0:21:33 That other guy may know things better than I do.
0:21:40 You have to be always ready to admit that you are wrong, which is difficult.
0:21:40 It is.
0:21:45 One thing Albert can do, and we’ve done an episode on him before.
0:21:54 One thing he convinced me of was that more harm has come into the world through people who were absolutely convinced that they were right, that they had the truth.
0:21:59 In other words, from people utterly lacking in humility.
0:22:00 Oh, yeah.
0:22:01 Oh, yeah.
0:22:04 It’s something that we are facing right now.
0:22:13 It’s regardless of our personal political affiliations, we tend to see the other party, the other side as wrong.
0:22:19 We are convinced that only our beliefs, our sympathies, our political preferences are the right ones.
0:22:29 And whatever comes from the other side is toxic, is wrong, is a threat to democracy, which leads us to such a crisis of democracy.
0:22:31 There may be truth on the other side.
0:22:38 Obviously, we have our own preferences, and yet we have to stay open because nobody has a monopoly.
0:22:46 And I think it’s very hard to talk about failure without also talking about success, since neither concept is intelligible without the other.
0:22:52 Do you think we worship success too much in this culture?
0:22:53 I think so.
0:22:54 I think so.
0:22:56 There has to be a balance.
0:23:06 If we look at the past and other cultures, I think different cultures have achieved a better balance.
0:23:09 What I mean is that, of course, we do need success.
0:23:12 We need to be successful because otherwise it’s extremely frustrating.
0:23:15 It’s unhealthy to experience only failure.
0:23:17 It goes against the human nature.
0:23:20 It’s going to drive us crazy.
0:23:33 But if all our lives, practical lives, social lives, political lives, intellectual lives, are obsessed with success, we miss something important about what it means to be human.
0:23:44 Because it’s kind of it takes its blinds us, all that obsession blinds us and prevents us from seeing the bigger picture to seeing our condition in the world.
0:23:46 What’s really important?
0:23:56 So we do have in this country, for example, this obsession with rankings, with all kinds of indicators of status.
0:24:02 If you start believing in that and if you start acting in response to that, it takes away your life.
0:24:04 You become alienated from yourself.
0:24:07 You stop paying attention to what’s really important.
0:24:14 And what you want to do is just to be on top, to go to the best university possible, to have the most expensive car and so on.
0:24:18 And that’s damaging, spiritually damaging.
0:24:23 Well, I mean, I think we also have a very superficial and narrow definition of success.
0:24:29 You know, we all think we know what success and failure look like because we all know the markers of success in this culture.
0:24:37 But if those markers are wrong or unwise, then our stories about success and failure are leading us astray.
0:24:41 And I think that’s part of what you’re saying here, at least in the book.
0:24:50 Right, because the definitions of failure and success, of social failure and social success are products of a certain system.
0:24:55 Each society generates its own understandings of social and failure and success.
0:25:01 In ancient Greece, they would have a very different understanding of very different definitions, very different criteria and so on.
0:25:05 In ancient China, obviously, they would be doing something different.
0:25:12 So our own comes with its own, you know, projections and definitions and representations.
0:25:27 And that’s not separated from the fundamental presuppositions of our society, where the most important things are profit, profit making, production, consumption, kind of the indefinite growth of economic growth.
0:25:39 So if we take that into account, we realize that this societal push to succeed, to be optimistic about success, to hope that tomorrow there are going to be a better day and so on,
0:25:42 has something to do with the fundamental assumptions of our society.
0:25:51 Where, for example, it’s very important for banks to have clients and those clients, you know, they take loans and they have to pay them back.
0:25:55 And behind you have this culture of optimism and culture of success.
0:25:59 We have this general push towards a better future, right?
0:26:04 It’s always a better future, which is kind of a religion right now here.
0:26:13 If we all believe in a better tomorrow, it makes us better consumers, better citizens, better participants to the political project.
0:26:17 And of course, there is so much to lose in the process.
0:26:19 We may eventually lose our soul.
0:26:20 But what’s the alternative, right?
0:26:23 I mean, no one wants to believe in a shittier tomorrow, right?
0:26:28 I mean, we’ve still got to get out of bed in the morning.
0:26:34 We have, if you go back in the past, you have societies where, for example, the best things happen in the past.
0:26:40 You have a golden age and what the present is lived in the shadow of that golden age.
0:26:51 What we have here is some kind of echo of a strong Christian culture, Judeo-Christian culture, where the coming of a Messiah, the second coming of Jesus Christ,
0:26:56 was a lived experience, was the most important religious experience that people have.
0:27:03 Now, of course, we don’t have, we live in a secularized society, but we still believe in this coming of a better future.
0:27:05 So it’s coming from that place.
0:27:08 But in the process, we stop being believers.
0:27:13 We no longer believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ, you know, most of us.
0:27:21 But we do believe in the coming of a better prophets, of better, you know, car brands and so on, better technology.
0:27:24 That will improve our lives of better days in general.
0:27:26 Yeah.
0:27:29 Well, why do you think most of us want to succeed so badly?
0:27:35 You know, I realize that question may sound dumb and rhetorical, but bear with me because I don’t think it is.
0:27:44 You know, what I’m getting at is I don’t think most of us try to succeed because we believe there’s some inherent virtue in it.
0:27:54 I think we’re trying madly to succeed because it’s a means to recognition and status and reward.
0:28:01 It’s how we get the people around us to tell us that we’re good and smart and worthy.
0:28:06 And that relates to failure because this is partly why we’re so terrified of failing, right?
0:28:10 We don’t want to be judged as bad or low status or deficient.
0:28:12 I understand those kinds of fears.
0:28:13 I mean, I share them.
0:28:15 I mean, who doesn’t get that?
0:28:23 But it is worth reflecting on just how much those feelings guide our lives and what the cost of that is.
0:28:28 That’s an excellent point in our society, which worships success.
0:28:33 We want to succeed because we don’t want to stand out in a bad way.
0:28:42 I have a chapter, as you know, in the book where Choran, Emil Choran, a Romanian-born French philosopher, a brilliant writer, a very successful writer in a way,
0:28:45 chooses the life of a parasite in Paris.
0:28:51 He moves from Romanian to Paris and chooses to do nothing, you know, lives like a beggar.
0:28:58 All he does is thinking through his own condition, the condition of the society in which he lives and so on.
0:29:08 And the end result is a body of work, an extremely interesting body of work, which comes with metaphysical depth, with stylistic beauty and so on.
0:29:18 So to go back to your question is the pressure to succeed is, in fact, at its core, a pressure to conform to societal norms.
0:29:27 I don’t want race to succeed as I want to be with others, to be accepted, just as you said, not to stand out in a bad, shameful way.
0:29:29 It’s not really success in itself.
0:29:37 It’s the fear of marginalization, the fear of becoming an outcast, of solitude, the whole conversation of failure and success.
0:29:46 It should be connected to a larger conversation about society, about social standards, social pressures, and so on.
0:29:50 Yeah, you know, something you take on in the book and I love that you do this.
0:29:57 Is this effort to rebrand failure as a quote stepping stone to success?
0:30:00 And this is something you see this trope all over the place.
0:30:03 You see it in the tech world, you find it in self-help literature.
0:30:05 You hear it in sports a lot.
0:30:09 Why is that mode of thinking just wrong-headed for you?
0:30:12 Because it doesn’t really deal with failure.
0:30:15 Really, it’s just another conversation about success.
0:30:19 Because fundamentally, failure is unpleasant, is ugly, is terrible.
0:30:24 Failure at its core is something profoundly unpleasant to experience.
0:30:36 And what those people, you know, talking about failure as a stepping stone to success are doing is sugarcoating, turning it into a conversation about success.
0:30:38 We don’t like to talk about death.
0:30:40 We don’t like to talk about failure.
0:30:43 We don’t like to talk about many unpleasant things.
0:30:56 But by having certain ways of dealing with that by sugarcoating and reusing a certain kind of language, we give the impression that we’ve dealt with a problem where we haven’t actually.
0:30:59 We have the sheer fact that we fail.
0:31:00 There is failure out there.
0:31:05 And those people in all those self-help gurus and so on, they cannot ignore the fact.
0:31:15 What they do instead, they hijack the conversation and they shift it and they move it into a place where it’s made more pleasant.
0:31:18 Ordinarily, we don’t want to hear unpleasant things.
0:31:21 We don’t buy a movie ticket to watch a tragedy.
0:31:27 We want to go in a movie theater and have a good time and be entertained.
0:31:36 That’s why those people, you know, self-help writers and so on, they may be well-meaning and they may be helpful in some way.
0:31:49 But at the end of the day, I don’t think they help us too much because they manage to avoid what’s really at stake, the dark nature of failure, the dark truth that the human condition is all about.
0:31:58 I mean, I guess it’s part of this notion that the whole point of life is to just get closer and closer to perfection and any mishaps, any failures along the way.
0:32:00 Well, those are just diversions.
0:32:12 Whereas what you’re saying, no, no, that’s actually a really, really essential part of living as the flawed creatures that we are and turning away from that is a mistake.
0:32:16 Exactly. It’s a matter of framing how you look at the world.
0:32:25 There are different ways. So we have, for example, in some very serious religious traditions, spiritual, intellectual and religious traditions like Buddhism.
0:32:29 The very first truth of Buddhism is life is suffering.
0:32:34 It’s a very brutal, you know, opening to leave is to suffer, right?
0:32:41 We have in Christianity, similarly, the episode in the Garden of Eden was relatively brief.
0:32:44 We don’t know much because in that place, you don’t have stories.
0:32:48 And then we have the fall, the human history starts with the fall.
0:32:59 So my reading of failure is an attempt to connect with those traditions, which I consider deeper, Buddhism and Christianity and others.
0:33:05 Even if my own position is secular, it’s not necessarily religious, doesn’t exclude religion, but it’s not necessarily religious.
0:33:11 My framing is of such a nature that the world is fundamentally a failed project.
0:33:15 We come from nothing, we return to nothingness.
0:33:24 We are meant to die, no matter how much we work on this, how much we pay for better medicine and better technology and so on.
0:33:28 We all end up there. Failure is an accident.
0:33:33 Whatever is good in our lives, whatever is positive is something that we extract from failure.
0:33:38 We extract from nothingness. We extract from manylessness and so on.
0:33:48 So it kind of gives us, in a sense, it gives us more agency because I’m surrounded with misfortune and so on.
0:33:54 We are surrounded with bad things, and yet we manage to make something that’s livable.
0:34:00 We create a space where we can live a decent life, but that takes more effort.
0:34:08 If the world is bad and I manage to make a good life within this world, it takes an effort, it takes responsibility, it takes lots of things.
0:34:13 Whereas the other position, you know, the default mode, as you said, is optimistic.
0:34:15 You don’t have to do much.
0:34:28 If optimism is easy, why should we engage with failure?
0:34:31 Is there something positive to gain from it?
0:34:33 We’ll discuss after one more quick break.
0:34:38 [Music]
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0:36:08 Ooh, conserve energy and save money?
0:36:10 Maybe to buy those matching winter jackets?
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0:36:39 Do you think of this as a gloomy pessimistic book?
0:36:41 I don’t think it is.
0:36:45 Maybe on a superficial reading, I guess it could be seen that way.
0:36:49 But do you self-consciously think of it as dark and pessimistic?
0:36:56 No, actually, no. In part because of the stories I use, those are sometimes even funny stories.
0:37:02 Yeah, I don’t think it’s dark at all, but this is a good time to kind of come back to this idea of biological failure.
0:37:07 Or this idea that our death is like the ultimate failure, right?
0:37:09 And I definitely hear what you’re saying, right?
0:37:15 We are quite literally born into a losing struggle.
0:37:20 Life is a definitional failure in the sense that we start to die the second we’re born.
0:37:25 But life is not necessarily a failure just because it ends, right?
0:37:28 Yes, you can look at it that way.
0:37:29 Because I don’t think it is.
0:37:33 One of the assumptions of the book is failure is a fluid thing.
0:37:36 It’s kind of dynamic.
0:37:39 Let’s take that example you just used.
0:37:46 Life is not necessarily a failure when doctors have to indicate the cause of death or somebody.
0:37:48 They would use this language.
0:37:50 It may be a slip, a slip of tongue.
0:37:52 They use organ failure.
0:37:58 The assumption somehow, it’s an unconscious assumption, unspoken, is that we may, in principle,
0:38:03 we may work for our organs, our bodies, may work indefinitely.
0:38:07 Should we just find the right equipment, the better technology, the better treatment?
0:38:12 Even in the medical profession, this dream of an indefinite life.
0:38:15 But then they would come up with the idea of failure.
0:38:18 It’s interesting how it kind of slips in.
0:38:26 Again, it’s a back and forth because it’s so much is involved, emotions and understanding and enlightenment and so on.
0:38:28 It’s a very individual, very private matter.
0:38:41 So much depends when we are having this conversation on the individual, on our possessions as individuals, on what we’ve experienced, on what we internalized, on the lives we’ve lived and so on.
0:38:53 So it’s kind of, it’s very difficult to have a detached purely theoretical discussions on failure because it’s one of those topics in which everything is involved, our whole beings.
0:38:56 When we talk about love, for example, we have a similar situation.
0:39:07 We cannot really talk about love without bringing in all the personal baggage, all the loves we had or the betrayers, all the things that come with love and so on.
0:39:24 Yeah, I guess I believe, and maybe you do too, that we should keep an eye on our mortality because living a meaningful, worthwhile life means accepting the truth of our condition while also, in some sense, rebelling against it.
0:39:36 This is Camu and the mythososophist, right, this idea that the world only appears absurd or meaningless because we demand that it have some sort of higher meaning.
0:39:46 But just because it doesn’t, doesn’t mean it’s meaningless, it just means it is on us to make it meaningful, to live and create and affirm, right?
0:39:49 These things, just because they don’t last forever, doesn’t mean they’re not worth doing.
0:39:55 In fact, because they won’t last forever is partly what makes it so meaningful and special in the first place.
0:40:05 I like that point. It’s not that, you know, by dying, we fail, right? Our life is a failed life because one day we’ll die.
0:40:19 When we don’t die properly, when we don’t learn how to die, when we don’t understand our mortality properly, when we don’t come to terms with our mortality well before the event happens to us,
0:40:28 this kind of understanding that’s so demanding, so important that we may need a different term, we call it enlightenment.
0:40:31 That’s what you get in those spiritual traditions.
0:40:41 Those people, you know, the Zen masters and so on, the enlightened people of Sufism and so on, didn’t live failed lives because they died, I would say.
0:40:52 Whenever that moment came for them, they were better equipped to grasp it, to make sense of it, to see it as some kind of culmination of their project rather than as a misfortune, right?
0:41:03 Coming to terms with mortality, making sense of death, you know, well before it happens, that help us not necessarily die better, that will happen, but also live better.
0:41:06 Have you ever read Nietzsche’s riff on sand castles?
0:41:08 Which is where?
0:41:20 God, I don’t remember where this is or what book this is in, but he has this idea that you can gauge someone’s relationship to time by looking at how they build a sand castle.
0:41:22 And he has these like three different examples, right?
0:41:28 One guy will bitch about the fact that the waves are just going to come wash it away.
0:41:31 Maybe he’ll build a sand castle, but he’ll grumble along the way, right?
0:41:35 And another guy, well, he won’t even build it at all because why the hell would you bother, right?
0:41:39 The tide’s just going to come in and destroy it anyway, so the hell with it.
0:41:47 And then there’s this third person who throws himself into building a sand castle joyously and with passion, knowing it’s going to be washed away by the tide.
0:41:54 But he builds anyway and builds with a smile on his face and like that is supposed to be this kind of paragon of what it is to like live an affirmative life.
0:42:04 You know that annihilation is the ultimate endpoint for all of us, but you still go on, you still throw yourself into the world despite it.
0:42:12 Excellent. That’s exactly the point of what you have in Japan, but also in Korea, elsewhere, the cherry blossom festival.
0:42:13 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:42:19 You celebrate, you know, the splendor, the beauty, the ultimate beauty of life.
0:42:23 And at the very same time, you know that tomorrow is not going to be there.
0:42:28 Just like Nietzsche’s sand castle, it’s there in all its splendor.
0:42:31 And yet, you know, it’s not going to last.
0:42:32 It’s gone tomorrow.
0:42:33 It will fail.
0:42:40 It will fail. Yeah, so you have that embedded failure in the process and you ignore it and yet you cannot ignore it.
0:42:45 Yeah, you write in the book that we are creatures of chance to use your phrase.
0:42:47 We’re born into this cosmic farce, right?
0:42:53 But our failures give us these these insights into our existence.
0:43:00 And you argue that we realize the magnitude of our accomplishments in spite of all these harsh realities.
0:43:04 You know, you say, we get the joke.
0:43:05 What’s the joke?
0:43:09 Is the joke that we’re here at all, that we’re conscious enough to know it’s a losing game,
0:43:12 but we get to play it with a smile on our faces anyway?
0:43:19 Yeah, the joke is that you have this sense of cosmic farce.
0:43:21 You come into this world fully aware.
0:43:27 We grow up and one day we become fully aware of the world and we push further.
0:43:29 We understand that we are creatures of chance.
0:43:33 We understand that we are just nothing, nothing really.
0:43:35 We are next to nothing.
0:43:37 And that’s a big joke, right?
0:43:43 Why should we be here in the first place if we we we are so insubstantial, if we are so flitting?
0:43:48 If we don’t mean anything, why should we be brought into this world?
0:43:54 By understanding the situation, by getting the joke, you somehow I’m not saying we come to master the situation.
0:43:56 That’s maybe too much.
0:43:59 But we cannot afford to smile, you know, complicit.
0:44:07 At the end, you describe the moment we wake up every morning where we don’t quite have our bearings yet.
0:44:10 We’re not quite thinking yet.
0:44:14 And very quickly, our memories start to return.
0:44:22 We start thinking about what we’re going to eat for breakfast, what we got to do that day or various obligations.
0:44:33 And the story of us begins to get retold and reinforced in our minds as we perform our life as it is.
0:44:38 Why is this the most significant moment of every day for you?
0:44:39 I just love this thought.
0:44:48 It is because that’s when we realize we have this overwhelming insight that to be is to be able to tell a story.
0:44:55 Every morning we become ourselves only at the moment when we remember who we are in a kind of articulate manner.
0:44:59 And more exactly when we are able to tell the story of who we are.
0:45:05 So we exist only to the extent that we can tell the story of our existence.
0:45:10 And we have that at the very end because that custom allied on the whole project.
0:45:13 It’s a final couple of pages of the book.
0:45:20 It gives you the key, I would say, to the whole project because it highlights the importance of storytelling.
0:45:22 In the end, it’s all about storytelling.
0:45:24 It’s how we manage to tell our story.
0:45:29 We can give us a meaning to the extent that we can tell a good story about us.
0:45:31 Yeah, you’re right.
0:45:36 It is just brief, brief flash of a moment.
0:45:42 But for that little fraction of a moment, we are kind of a blank slate.
0:45:47 And I could not agree more that we are, and I think you say this explicitly in the book,
0:45:50 that we are fundamentally storytelling creatures.
0:45:56 We narrate our way into meaning every day and we narrate our way into humility
0:46:01 and we narrate our way into and out of success and into and out of failure every day.
0:46:06 All of which is to say it really doesn’t matter which stories we tell ourselves.
0:46:07 So we should choose them wisely.
0:46:11 Right. That should make us more responsible.
0:46:21 Placing failure at the core of who we are and, in fact, turns us or should turn us into more capable agents.
0:46:23 It should give us more agency.
0:46:29 It sounds paradoxical, but I think I’m right here because if I admit those failures,
0:46:35 if I see where I fail, whatever is wrong, whatever is bad that happens to me and around me,
0:46:37 I have more stuff to do.
0:46:39 There is more space I can fill.
0:46:41 Really, there is room for improvement.
0:46:42 There is room for storytelling.
0:46:44 I have more stuff to do.
0:46:50 If my life story is only a story of success, all the good things and so on.
0:46:53 Really, that leaves me out, most of me out.
0:46:54 It’s paradoxical.
0:47:01 I’m just the, you know, the happy, the fortunate beneficiary of this long chain of blessings and successes and so on.
0:47:06 And there’s not much for me to do, right, except say yes and sure.
0:47:15 But, in fact, when we make a conscious decision to recognize failure in the world and in our lives, that empowers us.
0:47:17 Yeah, I mean, I guess bringing it back to Camu here at the end, right?
0:47:22 This is the image of Sisyphus that he wants us to grasp onto, right?
0:47:24 This Sisyphus is not a failure.
0:47:28 Life is not pointless just because that boulder rolls back down the hill.
0:47:29 Hell no, right?
0:47:33 No, you go back down, you make that boulder your own and you push it back up again, right?
0:47:35 And there’s meaning in that pushing.
0:47:38 And that’s also a counterintuitive way to think about Sisyphus.
0:47:41 But I think it aligns with what you’re saying here.
0:47:44 And I think it’s good and true.
0:47:44 Excellent.
0:47:49 I mean, I have Camus in the book, as you know, but not that particular image.
0:47:54 But as you are talking about this, I realize how much truth there is in that.
0:47:59 So probably in the back of my mind, there was this Camusian insight working there.
0:48:00 I love it.
0:48:06 Again, the book is “In Praise of Failure, Four Lessons in Humility.”
0:48:08 Costica Brataton, thank you so much for being here.
0:48:11 I love these kinds of conversations.
0:48:12 Thank you so much for having me, Sean.
0:48:33 [MUSIC PLAYING]
0:48:35 Patrick Boyd engineered this episode.
0:48:37 It was edited by A.M. Hall.
0:48:41 And Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:48:44 As always, let us know what you think about this one.
0:48:48 Was it a success, a failure, somewhere in between?
0:48:53 Send us an email and let us know at thegrayarea@vox.com.
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0:49:06 [MUSIC PLAYING]
0:49:09 (gentle music)
0:49:18 [BLANK_AUDIO]
At the beginning of the new year, many of us make pledges to change ourselves. We want to work out more. Or read more. Or cook more. Within a few months, some of us will have succeeded but many of us will have failed. When we do, we’ll probably tell ourselves to try again, that failure inevitably leads to success.
But is that true? And is failure really such a bad thing?
In this episode, which originally aired in March of 2023, Sean interviews professor Costica Bradatan about his book In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility. The two explore different kinds of failure and discuss how embracing our limitations can teach us humility and ultimately be good for us.
Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling)
Guest: Costica Bradatan, professor and author of In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility
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