The Failure of Failure?

Time of India

01-06-2025

Santosh Desai is a leading ad professional. He says he has strayed into writing entirely by accident, and for this he is "grateful". "City City Bang Bang" looks at contemporary Indian society from an everyday vantage point. It covers issues big and small, tends where possible to avoid judgmental positions, and tries instead to understand what makes things the way they are. The desire to look at things with innocent doubt helps in the emergence of fresh perspectives and hopefully, of clarity of a new kind. LESS ... MORE
Failure, today, is not allowed to die its natural death. It must be rehabilitated, repackaged, and recycled—turned into grit, grace, or growth. It is no longer a terminus but a threshold. The fall is not the end of the story, only the second act. Fail better. Fail forward. Fail fast. But by all means, fail usefully.
We tell ourselves we are being more open, more real. We celebrate vulnerability—as long as it is accompanied by hindsight. We speak of rejection, loss, collapse—but only once we have emerged intact, triumphant even, with a lesson to teach. The shame of failure is permitted, but only briefly and only as narrative bait.
There are many costumes we dress failure in. The most flattering is redemption. The stumble that made us stronger. The heartbreak that made us wiser. The bankruptcy that taught us discipline. All is forgiven, as long as it leads somewhere better. This is LinkedIn failure at its best, a pose worn by the successful to increase engagement, to say, Once I was a loser like the rest of you, but fear not; you too can be redeemed if I could be. Statistically speaking, It is an inclusive lie, but it serves its purpose.
Then there's the tragic-but-noble failure. The one born of principle, conviction, or timing. The artist who never sold, the idealist who died unknown, and the fighter who was undone by the world, not by their own missteps. This version dignifies failure—but it also aestheticises it. It is curated suffering. It leaves the soul intact. It makes us suffer on their account, to feel righteous from a distance, having no skin in the game. It gives us some succour to know that our failures may exist despite our being geniuses. In our mind at least. Look at van Gogh.
And when neither nobility nor redemption is available, we default to utility. Failure becomes feedback. A prototype. A data point. No time to feel, just iterate. The modern world is full of people who kept trying, or to use the language of the start-up, pivoting till something clicked and they made podcasts about it.
The overblown narrative that surrounds failure today is based on truth. People do redeem themselves, failure does teach lessons that success can come nowhere near, it builds resilience and humility and can makes us better not just in terms of material progress but as people. The problem perhaps is that this narrative is purely instrumental – it thinks of failure as a means to an end, burying the fact that there can be another kind of failure. The one we don't know how to name. The failure that simply hurts.
The kind that exposes you—not as a misunderstood genius or a courageous risk-taker, but as someone who misjudged themselves. The kind that brings not growth, but shame. Not insight, but silence. The kind of failure that makes you smaller, and not in a good way. Smaller, because you thought you could. And you couldn't.
This failure doesn't want to be posted about. It doesn't want to be learnt from. It doesn't want to teach you anything. It just wants to exist—to be carried, not converted.
We often say that younger generations lack the mental equipment to deal with failure. That Gen Z, in particular, is fragile, thin-skinned, over-therapised. That they crumble under pressure and overshare their wounds. But we, the older cohort, are hardly models of grace either. We pride ourselves on coping, on never making a fuss. But our inability to accept failure is just as deep—only better disguised.
We don't collapse; we deflect. We don't feel; we reframe. We have grown up believing that failure must always be private, always provisional, always recoverable. What we cannot bear is the idea that we may have been wrong about ourselves—that we aimed for something and missed, not because the world was cruel, but because we weren't enough.
The truth is, all of us are not built for greatness. A lot of us will lead ordinary lives, reaching destinations no one tells inspiring stories about. The sense of failure is often a product of unrealistic goals, something our culture is loath to admit is a real thing.
We speak the language of stoicism, but we are terrified of consequence. We cannot stand the thought that some things break and stay broken. That shame is not always a dysfunction. That some failures are just failures.
But maybe we need a place for that again. A place where not all pain needs to be processed. Where not all scars are signs of strength. Where we can fail—and not redeem, not repurpose, not post—but simply live with the weight of it.
Because failure, in its rawest form, teaches us nothing. It just tells the truth. And that, perhaps, is enough. Or should be. The modern tendency to take all that is hard and bitter and turn into a wellness potion of some kind serves to disconnect us from the idea of pain. Adversity takes on an unrecognisable shape with well-meaning language crowding out all exits.
It is important to recognise that we will have wounds, carry scars, grapple with our own failings. As people we wear skins over skins – layers grown not from growth but from the act of being. From enduring, not transforming. And that should mean something.
Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author's own.