Failing back to happiness?
For my 21st birthday I received a card with the words:
Happiness is like a butterfly. You don’t notice it there until it flies away.
At least that’s how I remember it. Amongst all the butterfly quotes on the internet today, none quite matches. As I talked about in a recent blog “The Rising Fall in Mental Health (part 2 of 3)”, our modern world often focuses on happiness. Government social research measures happiness. And towns vie for the status of being the happiest in the country. We focus on the pursuit of happiness and we measure it in wealth, physical perfection, careers, achievements, influence. There’s no room for flaws.
But does pursuing happiness work? This is what Elizabeth Day addresses in her little book failosophy: a handbook for when things go wrong, 2020, Harper Collins, London, written off the back of her podcast How to fail with Elizabeth Day.
The pursuit of happiness, with being the perfect self, stems from the birth of the self-help and actualisation movement in the 1950’s. Doesn’t seem to have worked. We are in a worse state than ever. We’ve failed. Might just as well embrace that failure and see what happens.
SEVEN PRINCIPLES OF FAILURE
One – Failure just is – it exists, you can’t have success without failure. Nobody says that the baby that falls the first time it tries to walk has failed. Failure is part of growth and learning. How we feel about failure is another matter. Worrying about it is pointless.
Success is a personal perception.
Jessie Burton, Author
Reflection: genuine failure isn’t something you can actively pursue. I mean, if you set out to fail, and then you fail, you’ve actually achieved what you set out to do. You’ve succeeded, not failed. If that idea sounds bizarre, that’s good. It probably makes you normal. But as a child I didn’t like the attention that came with praise. I secretly enjoyed the disappointment of my parents. It made me smile inside. I got pretty successful at failure. And I carried that through into adult relationships. How much different my life might have been had I not been so successful at ‘failure’.
Two – You are not your worst thoughts – success is temporary, we always need to move on to the next success. Worrying about what we have done or not done or need to do takes up time and energy. How we choose to think about an event, as a success or failure, or neither, doesn’t change the facts of what happened. And especially, it doesn’t change who we are as a person. And ultimately, we are in control of our own brain: we can choose how we think about things.
The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.
Eckhart Tolle, Spiritual Teacher
Three – Almost everyone feels they’ve failed at their twenties – a consistent theme Day noticed in her podcasts was just how many of her guests felt their failures most in their twenties. As if, having left childhood and their teens behind, they should have grown out of failure. At a time when they were just beginning to really learn how to truly navigate the world of adulthood. In a world that suddenly has less structure and signposts than the familiar boundaries of families and education. Seems kinda daft when you look at it like that, but every generation we pass through is a learning process, bringing new experiences and new challenges. As Day puts it, “your twenties are when you forge your identity, and work out who you are”, something that is getting harder and harder under the glaring spotlight of the perfection of social media, whilst battling with the challenges of careers and a world that seems to lurch from one financial crisis to another.
My twenties were hard. I was jelly. I was unfinished and unmoulded, and carrying a lot baggage and expectation about how I should behave.
Meera Syal, Actor, Comedian, Playwright, Author
Reflection: At 18 I moved to a new town, 50 miles from where I was born and ‘grew up’. When I moved back to my home town following a divorce 10 years later it took me another 10 years to stop calling the district where I lived throughout most of my 20’s ‘home’. Even now, 35 years later, when I visit, or pass through or by on my travels, I look wistfully at the place where I felt I really grew up, away from the microscope of family, free to make mistakes, independent, looking after myself and surviving, forging new career paths, truly discovering who I was (although I’ve discovered new selves since). I recall my mother one day visiting me where I was living in a bedsit and saying, “I wouldn’t want to know what you get up to when I’m not around, would I?” I just replied, “no”. Perhaps I understood that I didn’t need someone else labelling my travails of growing up as failures on the road in life, while I just saw them as life.
Four – break ups are not a tragedy – relationships are not just the romantic one on one relationships, but can also include friends and even family relationships. Maybe the relationship just wasn’t a good fit. Maybe that friendship was just for a season where your lives passed through similar circumstances and then took different directions. Maybe blood might not always be thicker than water. Eventually, sometimes quicker than other times, we get to look back and realise we can and have survived without that person. As Day puts it, “break-ups give us a crash-course in who we really are because when a relationship fails, we have to look at what part we had to play in its demise”. I would only add to that: if we choose to.
I look back and I go, “What an idiot.” But it’s great because I’ve learned from it and I’ll never do it again.
Vicky McClure, Actor
Reflection: At the beginning of her book Day suggests that readers will find some sections more useful than others. Whilst I know from experience that there are toxic relationships that really do have to end, and out of every loss there can be growth and new learning, in reading this section of the book I struggled with how easily the author easily accepts these changing relationships without considering the alternative of perseverance in maintaining and working through differences, not just in romantic relationships but in friendships and family too. But perhaps that’s because, 20 years older than the author, I’m in a different generational experience. As a child I didn’t understand the words of the embroidery sampler (those were the days) I worked on: “Make new friends but keep the old. The new are silver, the old are gold.” Making new friends in my 20’s was easy. Making new friends in my 30’s was easy. Even in my 40’s. But as each decade goes by so our numbers get depleted, we become more entrenched in our ways, less willing to be flexible to adapting to new friendships and relationships, our life commitments become more onerous, we have less energy, and we often become more wary and risk averse. Until eventually, we experience the loneliness of old age as our friends die off around us, and we physically cannot get out and make new friends, as I have seen with my parents. There is, I believe, a loneliness in the shallowness of ‘new’ relationships and friendships that have not been honed and tested over time, that is, I believe, at least part of the root of our current mental health crisis. My parents generation pioneered the nuclear family. My generation pioneered the acceptability of divorce. The next generation pioneered single parenthood as the norm. We have, as a society, steadily moved away from long term stable relationships and friendships, and being willing to work at what it takes to maintain them (where possible).
Five – Failure is data acquisition – one of Day’s early surprises in recruiting guests for her podcast was the gender split: women saying they had failed in so many ways and so many times they couldn’t whittle it down to just three to talk about on the podcast; men, on the other hand, were more inclined to say they struggled to think of as many as three incidences of failure. Actually, it seems, men just see things differently. Or as Day puts it, if you are cis gender, white, middle class and male you are still being born into a society that is made in your image. You live in a world where you are more likely to see any failure as something that can be easily overcome.
This gender balance did shift over time, but raises the importance of how we perceive and respond to failure. Does failure just bounce off your confidence and privilege? Or does it get absorbed by your self-questioning insecurities? Day asks, “what if we all started to view failure not as something that sinks us, but as something that can help us rise: a necessary piece of information that will help us take our next step?” Maybe in data collection, failure is not something to be avoided but something to be pursued, like the scientist seeking a cure for a deadly disease.
There’s something very freeing about being willing to try something that doesn’t work.
Malcolm Gladwell, Author
Six – There is no such thing as a future you – plans are all very well but there’s no telling what can derail them along the way. That plan you wrote five years ago? Relationship changes, health changes, social changes, financial changes, national political changes, international disasters. Anything can change our perspective. What we want today may be very different from the vision we had five years ago. Not sticking to goals that are no longer relevant to our lives is not failure. Imagining what we should be doing and feeling in 5 or 10 years, is influenced by what is happening around us today, not what will happen in the intervening years. Pursue goals by all means, save for a house, buy a house, save for a pension, just be prepared to remain flexible.
What’s next is what’s happening right now, where you are in this moment. Your universe will just keep moving the way it moves.
Cush Jumbo, Actor
Seven – being open about our vulnerabilities is the source of true strength – face failure head on, process it, correct what you need and can, and find yourself living a more authentic life. Accepting your failings, your faults, being honest with yourself, takes away fear and stress of being ‘found out’. Imperfections are what make us human. Being able to be honest about our own struggles and failings can help others to see their own experiences in a different light, even normal sometimes. And Day gives several examples of this.
This is no so different to the popular “PostSecret” website, where people anonymously send their secrets on a postcard to the PostSecret address. These secrets are shared in emails, books, exhibitions, and attract many letters of thanks from others who find they are not so alone in the world as they thought they were.
The more you can be vulnerable around failure, the more time you’re going to save other people. It’s an act of singular generosity.
Alain de Botton, Philosopher
Reflection: I should have learned this lesson much younger. I had the opportunity! Arriving late for work one snowy day my supervisor sent me to the store manager. I told him why I was there and who had sent me and he said it was OK, lots of people were having trouble getting to work because of the snow. Completely lacking in guile, I replied, oh no, I only live up the road, I overslept. He looked at me and said he would still let me off for being honest. It took me a few more years of fighting off shame and embarrassment to truly appreciate the time saving effect of just putting your hands up to any mistake and getting it over and done with. And sometimes I succeed.
Endword: And so there it is. Failing is normal. Mediocrity is OK. Failing is essential for growth and development and learning. Failing is embarrassing and emotionally painful. But the real failure is letting lesser failures dominate our lives and hold us back from being the person we can and should be. Wasting time hiding and shielding the world from your imperfections, when you could be enjoying learning and achieving new things. You can fail and still be at peace. To be successful is not to be known by others, but to be known by ourselves.
Social Work & Politics 