failure
how do you learn from something that gives you nothing
I think about this interview from 14 years ago given by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem a lot, where he talks about failure:
I was really a failure. Like really really really really really a failure. Like I I dropped out of college to make music, but then I stopped making music. I mean like really like just like not even an epic failure.
Just sort of like a sad pathetic failure. Just like kind of a real epic failure you could get behind. Like I tried this big thing and it failed and I lost everything. No, I just kind of like frittered my years away doing nothing and being in dead end relationships and deadend bands and stuff and I didn’t take responsibility for much. I kind of just like felt bad for myself and wondered why my life wasn’t better and stuff like that. […] And you know not long after like David Foster Wallace put out the book Infinite Jest and it really just floored it really depressed me cuz I was like if I start right now he’s older than me but if I started right now I wouldn’t get it done in time to be done with something write something like that by the time I was his age and have it come out it’s not possible.
To me, I had not heard anyone articulate this sort of abject failure in this way before. Most rhetoric, especially in tech-adjacent circles, failing is valorized. You have to fail fast. No one really takes about failure that you learn nothing from. Failure that is just empty.
There’s a few specific things he says that add a certain texture to understanding failure. One of the worst types of failure is inaction, like not really doing anything, staying complacent. It’s a certain fear or displacement, where you don’t pursue anything. Doing things requires energy, optimism and courage. Not everyone has that all the time but if you fail to make pivotal choices, time just passes.
For every James Murphy who’s failure eventually transmuted into success, there are countless others that never stablized into a form to tell others about.
“There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat; And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.” ― William Shakespeare , Julius Caesar