It all feels like failure
On the past, the future, and the inevitable distortion of the present moment
Every now and then, I am sent (send myself?) into an existential spiral, reminiscing about former iterations of Lauren and the places and situations she found herself in, but with the perspective of someone who has been through so much more since. In retrospect, it’s much easier to see the defining moments and pivotal opportunities for what they were, and to feel a delayed sense of gratification in knowing you were actually on the ‘right’ track. And yet, deep down, the lingering voice of self-doubt is transported from past directly to the present - a reproachful reminder that ‘if only’ you had ‘known this’ or ‘done that’, those same transformative moments could have been even more so. That somehow you dropped a ball you didn’t even know you were holding, and that success was actually failure in disguise.
The irony is that these imaginings pull you out of the present, instead directing you to dissect and ruminate over actions (or inaction) in the past, while distracting from the fact you may actually be at the precipice of yet another personal turning point — one you will inevitably come to replay your handling of at some other distant point in the future. Rinse. Repeat.
…We are always haunted by the myth of our potential, of what we might have it in ourselves to be or do. So when we are not thinking, like the character in Randall Jarrell's poem, that "The ways we miss our lives is life", we are grieving or regretting or resenting our failure to be ourselves as we imagine we could be. We share our lives with the people we have failed to be.
Missing Out by Adam Phillips
Lately, I have tried to bring a different awareness to these memories and try not to let my past self influence the recollections quite so much. Putting some distance between the sense of overwhelm, underachievement, incompetence or just general lack of confidence I may have felt at the time, and instead just reflecting on these moments with the perspective of an outsider. It’s in doing this that I’ve realised just how unreliable the earlier feelings actually were, and how little they served me in those moments in time - preventing me from fully experiencing the satisfaction I was otherwise entitled to.
All those times I thought I was ‘too late’ to something, and chose to stay in the background because I didn’t feel entitled to contribute or was worried about signalling that I didn’t belong, only to realise as the years passed that I was, in fact, rather early and everyone else was probably searching for that same sense of belonging as well. Those times I thought I wasn’t ‘good’ enough, so I held myself back in all manner of ways to avoid the risk of spectacular failure, only to realise where stepping forward and bringing everything I did have could have propelled me further than I could have even imagined. The times I just assumed those around me knew more than I did, leaving my instincts screaming for attention as I acted against them, only to hear the internal chorus of ‘I told you so’ a little too late. These things are all easy to see in retrospect, with the clarity of hindsight, but the reality is, none of those barriers should have mattered as much as they did in the first place.
“No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future.”
Thinking About Macro, Howard Marks
You see, even if I had been granted the gift of foresight to help me navigate past experiences toward what might be perceived as a more optimal outcome, perhaps it wasn’t the outcome I needed to be optimising for anyway. Perhaps what mattered was the process of learning to trust my gut, of speaking my truth, of fully leaning in to the opportunity I saw and seeing those around me as peers, rather than pedestal-dwellers of my own making, on that journey. Perhaps in the moment, it can never feel like anything but failure, and instead we can try and reframe its very notion. From a state of deficiency, to the process of acquiring and developing more desirable qualities through challenge, experience and putting yourself in the path of growth.
“When you focus on the past, that’s your ego. ‘I did this. We were able to beat this team 4-0. I did this in the past, I won that in the past’. And when I focus on the future it’s my pride. ‘Yeah, next game, Game 5, I do this and this and this. I’m going to dominate’. That’s your pride talking. Like it doesn’t happen, like you’re right here.
And I kind of like try to focus on the moment, in the present. And that’s humility, that’s being humble. That’s not setting no expectations. That’s going out there and enjoying the game.”
Milwaukee Bucks player Giannis Antetokounmpo 1
There are well-worn cliches that deal with this notion, which suggests it’s an unavoidable or core part of the human experience. But if we can stop our mind flitting between the past and the future, and refrain from using those ephemeral states as a measure of our present self-worth, we might actually be able to keep our mind in the moment. And maybe next time it looks, feels or smells like failure, we might be able to more accurately identify that uncomfortability as our opportunity to stretch. To shake off the misconceptions we have of ourselves up to that point, and to loosen the grip on what we think we’re supposed to become. If we can do all that, we might actually start to enjoy who and where we are.
TECH
“The rough outlines of future solutions are often understood and, in a sense, agreed upon well in advance of the technical capacity to produce them. Still, it’s often impossible to predict how they’ll fall into place, which features matter more or less, what sort of governance models or competitive dynamics will drive them, or what new experiences will be produced.” The Metaverse: What It Is, Where to Find It, Who Will Build It, and Fortnite by Matthew Ball
See also: The Metaverse Primer
“Optimists often seem intellectually lazier than pessimists, but increasingly, optimists are right.” Compounding Crazy by Packy McCormack, Not Boring
ECONOMY
“No one has privileged access to the future and market forecasts tend to be about as accurate as calling a coin toss. There are, of course, analogies that can be drawn about how the current environment maps onto previous historical data, but success in that depends crucially on how the future will, in fact, resemble the past, and whether the cited analogies turn out to be the governing ones. The record seems to show that sometimes they will and sometimes they won’t and we are back at the coin toss.” Investor Bill Miller quoted in Thinking About Macro from Oaktree Capital’s Howard Marks
THE HUMAN CONDITION
“We need more actual patronage, ones that provide both social and financial capital, and encourages more talented folk to pursue their vision. We need to try and figure out how good our talent recognition is and can be, and work monomaniacally on making it better. Any vision of the future that doesn’t have it would be one where we’re squandering our potential.” On Medici and Thiel, from Rohit Krishnan’s Strange Loop Canon