On Instagram I saw this guy making art. He had the beginnings of a semicircle in the color of green, and he brought his instrument on one end of the semicircle and started applying pressure on it to spread the green ink to fill the semicircle. His hand slipped and he threw the instrument on the canvas and that was the end of the reel.
So I’ll be honest, I thought that was the art. I can’t find the reel anymore because I don’t save everything I find noteworthy but if you saw it I have a feeling you would also think of the whole reel as a piece of art. What struck me as very odd was, many people commented the same thought as me and the artist was so stern and determined about what failure means to them.
He was so sure that failure was not subjective and that failure was an objective, universal thing. Many argued back at the guy but the guy was determined and would not change his mind. I’m not really interested in refuting against the guy, but watching that made me reflect upon the idea of failure.
I talk with a lot of people who believe their work isn’t good enough. Then I work with people who believe they are failures in life. I think they’re related but slightly different, and when I reflect upon the relationship between the two I think it has to do with volume.
If I’m generally okay but just have a few things that aren’t that great, then I’d think of myself as not good enough. But when I’m just generally bad across the board, it borders on failure. Not being good enough, this concept can apply to humanhood but i think failure of a human is graver than that.
Why do we feel like a failure? As I explore this I tried to remember instances when I felt like a failure. I felt like a failure when I messed up in a specific thing that was super important to me, like SAT tests or college admissions. Maybe job interviews as well, and can’t forget the time I got fired from work.
What I remember vividly about the specific feeling of failure is, feeling like it’s too much effort to try again and even if I succeed in the next attempt I’m too late. The entire cause of my life is a defeated one. Everything I did in my life was for this one thing and that thing is gone from me now. I could try again but there are so many things I have to do and I realistically don’t see myself picking up all the things I have to to succeed next time.
So it’s the comprehensive nature of being bad across the board, and there being some kind of a standard in which to evaluate the status of my life as worth living or not. We have two options here. We can either accept that we are a failure, a lost cause and just cruise through life as a failure or we can try again although it stings to join the success party significantly later.
The former option is of no concern to us in this writing because there is nothing you have to do to stop suffering but stop regretting. It already happened, it’s too late; we’re going to give up cleanly and accept our reality for what is, and appreciate the fact that we don’t have to try anymore.
The latter option is a bit more interesting to us. What do we do when we have so many things to do, so many things to fix about ourselves?
Actually I found the perfect example of this. In Korea you take the SAT-equivalent ONCE a year. You do well on that test, you get to go to college; you fuck up, you have to wait one more year.
It is everyone’s dream to get to the best college with one shot since Korea is still a very higher-education-oriented society. But many people bomb the test or fuck up. This leads to you having to take the test again next year. This is when a lot of students feel like they are failures, because their entire life goal for the past 12 years is down the drain and so are their optimized life plans.
Giving up would be like, just applying to a college anywhere you can with your score and just going to that college or just joining the work force. This means you’ll be on the lower end of the dating pool and your chances of getting good loans or investments will be severely limited (super fucked up, I know).
Trying again means you’re going to take the test again, but since it’s an annual test there’s a lot of material to cover. Thankfully you’re just out of the testing era so a lot of the knowledge is still fresh in your head so you can continue maintaining it while covering your gaps.
In reality many students lapse into relaxing because the big test is over. And they can’t get themselves to be disciplined again until like, summer time (the test is in November) and they have to cram again. Which greatly increases the stress again. Which leads to bombing the test again. A sizable proportion of the test takers take it more than two times.
The people who score well regardless of how many times they take the test are people who tend to take the studying easily but consistently. These people don’t tend to be stressed about things because they understand that stress actually works against them. To the stressed and the non-stressed, one thing remains the same: they take the same test covering the same comprehensive material, so they have to study the same thing. But how you engage in the study makes a night and day difference.
You could end up in your dream college at the third or fourth attempt. And as you see your classmates much younger than you in the same class and see your peers much more advanced than you, you will have reminders that you were a failure. But when you’re in your 30’s or 40’s, does the number of attempts it took for you to go to college matter… That much? It doesn’t.
The crazy thing about Korean society is, there are more tests that are designed like this. All federal employee entrance exams work like this and so do bar exams and teacher exams. So many young people in Korea rot away in testing systems and end up exiting their lives because of repeated instances of being a failure, one after the other.
Then you have people like me: Korean by blood, but not playing the Korean game at all. I didn’t even take the Korean SAT’s and I didn’t go to Seoul National University. I never took any government exams and I don’t have a comfy federal job, which means I won’t get pension after I get forcibly retired by my employer. Many Korean peers of mine would classify my life as a failure.
Being a failure requires a subscription to a belief system about success in the first place. Are all SNU graduates happy? Are all Korean federal government workers and lawyers happy? They’re successful by all Korean means, but what’s the point of being successful if it won’t make you happy?
This ended up being a super Korean writing, but I think the point is pretty evident. We all unconsciously subscribe to some model of success and frequently evaluate whether we are successes or failures.
But do you really want to be either..?