Failure is the point.

We get sold a lot of shit in this crazy, go-go world of ours. Climate change is no biggie. Delicious carob animal snacks with half the calories but all the flavour. "People are looking at your LinkedIn profile, John!" But of all this dubious content, perhaps the most pernicious is the idea that we need to be one percent better every day.

Here's the truth: Real progress in anything meaningful is hard-won and non-linear. It’s a grind, requiring consistent struggle and failure. Your success in life is not built on daily micro-improvements but mostly on just showing up, day after endless day.

Because even a one-percent improvement in your deadlift, your singing voice, or your understanding of quantum mechanics is not likely overnight and is that continual gain-of-function is not sustainable over time.

You might even go backwards.

Arnold Schwarzenegger tells the story of spending the entire night crying in his hotel room after losing the 1968 Mr Universe competition. He’d arrived in the US after bagging every title available at home, imagining that his path could only lead onward and upward from there. It did not. Or at least not that night.

After thirty-plus rejections, Stephen King tossed the manuscript for Carrie into the bin, disgusted with it and himself for imagining anybody would want to read it. He crawled off back to his minimum wage job at a laundromat. His wife Tabitha fetched it out of the trash and convinced him to go on to just, you know, turn up again for another shitty day at the keyboard.

The paths these guys walked show us that there’s nothing predictable or linear in life. Nobody is going to get better every twenty-four hours, and pretending that you will leads to bin-dunking your manuscript and ugly crying in the fail motel.

Of course, both Arnie and the King did get better, but their long climb up the happy staircase to success took years and featured many more stumbles. Just turning up and not really kicking arse was a big part of it.

I’ve reached a point in my life and career where I suspect that continual improvement is less important than simply showing up.

I loved literary super nerd Henry Oliver’s point, which glanced off this the other day: Most of us will die without writing a great novel, but we can all read Anna Karenina.

Spoiler Alert. I’m not gonna read Anna Karenina, but he convinced me that maybe I should get around to turning up, sitting down, and reading War and Peace, the original splodey epic. And not just reading it, but studying the motherfucker and understanding it.

I can’t help but feel that if I made the effort to just show up and chew on a bit of Tolstoy, as hard and gristly as that might be, it might be good for me.

Oliver was making a point about the improving self, but he wasn’t being all weird and Book Tok about it. He simply thought that we should struggle against mediocrity, our own in particular, and whether we succeeded was not the point.

Showing up is the point, and although he didn’t say that failure was a feature, it does sorta come with the deal.

That’s not a message likely to go viral anytime soon, though. What you’ll mostly hear from the militant positivity jihad is a wall of sound manifesting as aggressive narcissism.

“I did three thousand crunches/ate a metric shit tonne of fibre/did yoga every day for thirty days and this is what happened.”

TLDR: You got slightly better at sitting up and not farting in the communal yoga yurt.

Perhaps dressed up a little, the idea of consistent effort with no promise of immediate reward or improvement, ie. just showing up, might appeal. It reminds me a lot of the old existentialist quest for transcendence. But easier. As long as you show up for the right thing.

For de Beauvoir and Sartre the trap of existence was absorption not just in but by the trivial and meaningless. If they were still around rockin’ berets and necking down endless apricot martinis, I’d lay money on the barrelhead that they’d recognise the danger of absorption by the infinite online. Jean Paul Sartre’s nausea arose from a profound sense of disorientation and discomfort when confronted by the meaningless of… stuff. In the rearview mirror, accelerating away from his era, it looks and feels a lot like the slightly queasy feeling I sometimes think of ‘the 3PM Blergh’; that sick, demoralising sensation you get after fucking around online and looking up to find out that you’ve wasted yet another of the dwindling number of days allotted you on this planet.

I showed up at the desk, but, er, something went per-shaped after that.

“Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do,” Sartre wrote in Nausea.

Unless what you want to do is give up, in which case 3PM is just about the perfect time.

Nausea, the Blergh, whatever you want to call it, arises from a loss of meaning, a loss of any connection to what’s grounded and firm. For us, specifically, I think it’s triggered by the rootless, untethered feeling of floating around on an endless sea of digital shit.

And you what isn’t gonna help with that?

Some glowing, beady-eyed, ratbastard influencer yammering at you to get one per cent better every day.

All that noise, it’s all just… a bit much.

You can get better at things, at life, whatever. Not at everything, though. Like you, I will never write Anna Karenina.

But we’re not going to get better at everything, overnight or every day.

Most of the time, dragging yourself into the day and being aware of what you’re aware of, making a small effort to spend that attention wisely, it’s enough. Seriously. Go easy on yourself.

Henry Oliver has decided to spend his attention on the great books. Me, I might go read some of the fight scenes in War and Peace. But I also want to get my deadlift up to 2x my bodyweight and maybe spend less time on Facebook.

I know I can improve my deadies, but not every day, and not forever. Otherwise I’d eventually be pulling neutron star mass off the floor.

So I’m gonna work on that. I’m gonna show up, but I’m gonna do it knowing there’s a lot of failure in my future.

The Facebook thing, though?

Yeah, I reckon I can cut that right the fuck back on that.