‘Nothing Is Ever Enough’

Author Joe Moran on why even high-achieving people often feel like failures.

Photo curation: Patrick on Unsplash.

Last week, I posted an interview with author Joe Moran, whose terrific book, If You Should Fail, helped me sort out my thoughts on success and failure for a popular post I wrote about Elon Musk’s Twitter fiasco.

Joe and I had a terrific conversation, a portion of which is below. Paid subscribers can watch the entire interview here.

Joe is a professor of English at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. In addition to If You Should Fail, he is the author of many other books including Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness (2016) and First You Write a Sentence (2018). He has written regularly for the Guardian, the Observer, the New Statesman and other publications.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

SE: There is a much-repeated piece of self-help wisdom that says that failure is just the first step on the path to success. You take issue with that idea. Would you tell me a little bit about why?

JM: It’s a very pervasive contemporary idea. It emerged in the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s startup culture. I call it the “failing well” movement, the idea that failure is a positive thing. My first problem is that it's not necessarily true that failure is the first step towards success. I can see that it's better than saying in a macho way, “Failure is not an option.” And superficially, it’s quite a kind thing to say to someone who's failed—"don't worry, it’s just the first step to something else.” But the problem is that life isn't like a story. There is not necessarily a narrative arc to life. Life is just a mess. Failure is sometimes the first step to something else; most successes emerge out of surviving failures. But quite often, failure is just failure. And it doesn't need to do anything.

There's a critic called Lauren Berlant who calls it Cruel Optimism. There's something that can be cruel about the obsession with turning everything into an opportunity for personal growth. Because then if you fail, and then you don't succeed, then you really do feel like a failure.

SE: The “failing well” movement borrows from a famous quote that you talk about: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” As you say in your book, “fail better,” in particular, is something we see on inspirational posters, tea towels and coffee mugs. Would you talk about the origin of that quote?

JM: It comes from Samuel Beckett, a late work of his called Worstward Ho. If you know anything about Beckett, all his writing is about failure. He considered himself a failure. He actually was a very successful young man. He was a very star scholar, gave it all up. Most of his career, he failed to get things published and didn't really become famous at all until his late 40s. And all his work is really about the inevitability of failure, and the lack of a redemptive arc to life. Some of my favorite quotes from Beckett are all about that. “You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.” “Despair young and never look back.” That's another of my favorite Beckett quotes.

If you actually read that quote in the context of the book Worstward Ho, all the surrounding prose is repetitions and verbal sentences. And within that context, it just reads very differently to how it's been read, which is this inspirational quote that implies, just keep trying and you'll be OK.

I think what it really means is, you have to just keep on hauling your body through the world, when you actually know that failure is inevitable. There's another quote from Worstward Ho, which is “plod on and never recede,” which I quite like, although you can understand why that has not ended up on tea towels.

SE: You talk about the fact that prior to the mid-19th century the word “failure” meant simply a business that had folded. When did we start calling people failures, and what brought that on?

JM: This is something that the historian Scott Sandage talks about in a really great book called Born Losers about failure in 19^th-century America. He says that until about the mid 19^th century, the word failure just meant an incident of failure, not an identity. And that was around the time that failure started to mean a person; it became something that you were, rather than something that had happened to you.

His explanation is that this is when the American economy, and eventually the world economy, settled into a pattern of boom and bust. You would have these periods of growth, and then a crash—arguably, we're still in that cycle now. So if you're a small businessman, you became less in charge of your destiny because how you fared became dependent on these kinds of massive economic forces. That was exactly when people started talking about those kind of people as failures, and actually a lot of the vocabulary that entered everyday life to talk about failures comes from that period. He traces it back to credit-rating agencies that would say whether you were worthy of being given a loan. We talk about a good-for-nothing now, but that literally meant somebody who you should not lend anything at all to because they were good for nothing, as opposed to someone who was good for $100. And a deadbeat is someone who there's no point suing for nonpayment, because it would be like flogging a dead horse. So there's this whole new idiom, this whole vocabulary that develops to think about failure as a deficiency of the self, rather than something that is socially produced.

SE: You write that by the 20th century you didn't even need to have had a business fail or lose a job. It just could mean being an ordinary person. You mention Willy Loman—he is presented as a tragedy for being basically an ordinary person. But most of us, by definition, have to be average—we can't all be remarkable. I’m just curious about what you think about that whole shift. How did we become so harsh with ourselves and with each other?

JM: Death of a Salesman is quite a good example because if you watch that play now, Willy Loman looks quite comfortably off, compared to very precarious zero-hours people now, he's actually doing OK. But yeah, Sandage talks about this, the way that just being a routinely obscure person is not enough. And I suppose it's just how capitalism works, isn't it? Nothing is ever enough. I know that from my own work as an academic that every year is year zero; it's just permanent growth. So it means that even very high-achieving people often feel like failures or inadequate, because that's just how capitalism works. It just carries on. I suppose it's also just a fundamental rule of sociology; they say that where two or more people are gathered together, invidious comparisons will be made or something like that. That’s kind of how human society works as well. We invent ways of making our lives hell because we just keep comparing ourselves to each other.

SE: We all know that losing stinks. But you also talk about how winning is not necessarily as it's made out to be. What did Virginia Woolf understood about this that maybe the rest of us can learn from?

JM: Virginia Woolf is one of my great intellectual heroes. And one of my favorite books by her is a book that not that many people know of called Three Guineas, which is kind of a sequel to A Room of One's Own. And like A Room of One's Own, it’s about patriarchy and this world of honors and prizes and graduation ceremonies. It’s saying this is just silly—this world of status and prestige and honor. Virginia Woolf is often caricatured as a snob, which she was in some ways—she was a woman of her age and class. But in other ways, she wasn't a snob at all. She refused pretty much all honors that she was offered. She basically just said, I don't want any part of this. And I think what it teaches us is that meritocracy can be the reason that the even people who succeed within that system often feel like failures or feel that they're not doing enough. It’s such a narrow version of success. Just doing well in exams, getting prizes. I say in the book that I'm sort of a meritocrat, but I'm more of a democrat. I think of meritocracy as about being one of the chosen; that's why it can often feel empty. You do well in exams. You get your first-class degree or whatever. You get a great job. But essentially, you're often doing what the culture itself thinks of as successful. Democracy is about choosing; it's about choosing your life.

That can be harder. It’s a more lonely thing that Virginia Woolf did. She wasn't actually very successful in her own life, but she wrote in a way that invited confusion and perplexity in her readers. She wasn't afraid to write weird books. She wrote a book about Elizabeth Browning's cocker spaniel from the perspective of the cocker spaniel. She wrote a book, Mrs. Dalloway, about a single day in London. When you do things like that, you'll inevitably set yourself up to fail because you're doing something that's not been tried before. And one of the themes of Woolf's writing really is just how weird and incommensurable a single human life is. So how could you define that in terms of a prize or a medal? Life itself is just too miscellaneous and shapeless. It's just daft to put a medal on somebody and say, “Yeah, you're better than that person.” Despite the fact that she was seen as quite snobby about certain groups of people, really her work is about how every person is unique.

SE: We all fail at some point in our lives. What do you think is the most constructive way to think about it? Or what do you tell yourself or your friends, when you have a disappointment or a failure, or they do?

JM: Well, one thing I never say is “failure is the first step to success.” I don't try and give people false consolation or just say, “just keep trying, and you’ll succeed,” because I don't know that. They might do, but I don't know that for sure. I try and say, “Don't be ashamed of it,” because that’s the problem. The way we think about failure is very polarized; it's either oh it's great you failed, that's just a stepping stone to something else, or it's a secret shame. And I do think shame is the great unspoken force in social life. Shame is just an ordinary emotion, just something we feel every day, and I think there's a lot of secret shame about failure. I just think failure is nothing; it's just a waste of time. It's not something to be proud of. But it absolutely isn't something to be ashamed of, either. The problem with saying, “Don't worry, carry on,” is that you're not actually acknowledging how people feel, which is terrible.

I think of meritocracy as about being one of the chosen; that's why it can often feel empty. … But essentially, you're often doing what the culture itself thinks of as successful. Democracy is about choosing; it's about choosing your life.

And I do try to be honest about my own failures as well. Ironically, my own writing career stalled a bit partly because the failure book was a failure. It hasn't really sold. So I try to be honest about that, but it's always a bit of a balance. You don't want to be a whinging writer, do you? Because nobody asked you to be a writer.

In the book, I talk about a writer called Seymour Krim, who wrote a great essay called “To My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business.” I like that title. It suggests that failure is solidarity, which is never really talked about. We talk about failure as being for you, individually, a stepping stone to something else. Of course, it's true that some people can fail upwards and keep failing and be successful, but most of us encounter it eventually. We fail. Your body fails you. Life doesn't end well, as we know. So to think of failure as something that is not you. It's not your fault. It's a crazy system, but it's also something that we all share as human beings.

SE: That brings me to a quote I love from your book: “At the core of our neurosis lies a small seed of sanity and sense. We are searching for a world beyond success or failure, where we would not need to act like winners or disguise our fear that we are losers.” Do you have any additional thoughts on tapping into that sanity?

JM: That quote comes from a part about impostor syndrome. There is a core of sense in impostor syndrome that what we really want is to get to a world beyond success or failure, where we're not defined in that way. I haven't succeeded in doing that myself. But I suppose one of the things that makes me feel better about either failure or success is just finding your own niche. This is what you do that’s not necessarily better or worse than anybody else. One of the things that I have managed to do within academia … I'm not an eminent person in my field at all. I don't really have a field. But I write things that have a bit of a voice, which is quite unusual in academia because a lot of academic writing is quite professionalized and anonymous. So I write things that maybe are a bit quirky or weird, but they are me. So that's what I try to do, I suppose. Be your incommensurable self, because if you're not failing, or succeeding, then you're just going off on your own track. You're just being true to yourself. And the other thing I try and do—again, with limited success—is just enjoy the process a bit. I don’t really enjoy writing very much, but finding stuff out and doing research, doing reading—I do enjoy those things. And that’s a world beyond success or failure, because it's just the activity itself. I think curiosity is a great underrated human virtue. Being curious about other people, being curious about the world. That’s beyond success or failure because you're not really thinking about yourself. You’re invested the world.

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Paid subscribers can view this entire conversation, where Joe and I also discuss the problem with graduation speeches, the time each of has spent in the awards industrial complex, and the career of Sinéad O’Connor. I also tell Joe about some of my own struggles with failure.

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How do you cope with failure? Has the way you regard success and failure evolved over the course of your lifetime? If so, how?