The fetishisation of failure

Awhile back, I followed the career of the writer Elizabeth Day, but not in a good way; rather, I followed it much as a fly must have followed a muck-cart in the olden days. Her column for the Mail on Sunday, from 2018 to 2021, was quite probably the worst column ever to appear in a newspaper up to that point. I dubbed her The World’s Worst Columnist (and it wasn’t envy, as I had a cushy billet at the Sunday Telegraph at the time) and took great delight in sharing the choice cherries of triteness atop her weekly Sunday sundae of banality with my mates on social media. She was actually paid to write a whole column about her dishwasher;

Perhaps we dislike the act of putting things away because it reminds us of the endless cycle of life: the investment of hopes and dreams (loading dirty plates), the hope of renewal (the washing) and then the realisation that we have to go through the whole thing again (the unloading) until we break down… or the dishwasher does. A cheery thought – it’s possible I’m analysing it all too much.

This is prose which is literally as dull as dishwater. Day has proved to be to Adrian Chiles what The Beatles were to Oasis – only rubbish. However, whatever her failings as a hack, Day could never remotely be described as a failure. I’m going to put on my judge’s hat on at a jaunty angle here and state boldly that, furthermore, she has no excuse to be one; highly privileged, she was privately educated and scored a double first in history at Oxford. Her progress into journalism was smooth, winning her the Young Journalist of the Year Award in 2004 when she worked at the Telegraph and a commendation for Feature Writer of the Year at the Observer in 2012. She also wrote novels; her most recent novel Magpie, published in 2021, is really good. Even more reason why it’s so odd that Day’s greatest career triumph has been with a podcast called How To Fail. She came back to my notice last week when the Times gushed that: ‘Elizabeth Day has noticed that her podcast, How to Fail, is often the only solo female-led show in the top 20 on the UK podcast charts. To try to address this imbalance, she has launched her own podcast production company,’ accompanied by a slick picture of the glossy, groomed Day and the quote ‘middle-aged white men dominate podcasts. I want to change that’.

Roll over, Valerie Solanas, and tell Shelagh Delaney the news! Everybody wants to kid themselves that they’re an outsider these days, born and bred members of the liberal elite most of all. It’s not just the preposterous prospect of a middle-aged – and at least as middle-class – white woman calling people out on their privilege; it’s the hilarious juxtaposition of a podcast called How To Fail being so consistently successful. And that, to quote Day’s website:

The 2019/20 How To Fail Live nationwide tour’ played to multiple sell-out venues across the country, including dates at The London Palladium, The National Theatre and the Southbank Centre in London, and iconic venues such as The Lowry in Salford and The Mac in Belfast. Elizabeth has written two books off the back of the podcast: How To Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong, is part-memoir, part-manifesto. It is also a Sunday Times top 5 bestseller. Failosophy: A Handbook For When Things Go.

And the fact that past guests have included such notorious losers as Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Jamie Dornan, Gloria Steinem, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Andrew Scott and Bernadine Evaristo. And the happenstance that Day is ‘a sought-after public speaker, and has delivered talks and workshops to numerous organisations including Google, Facebook, Netflix, JP Morgan, HBSC and Barclays.’ Doesn’t building a How To Fail brand, complete with sell-out gigs, approach the level of duplicity involved in South Park’s ‘World Wide Privacy Tour’?

But it’s not just Day who’s attempting to put the ‘lure’ into failure. The philosopher Alain de Boton has not just appeared on Day’s podcast attempting to out-limbo her under the bar of humility but has also pronounced on the positive benefits of failure for his Youtube channel. Scion of an extremely rich Zurich banking family, it’s fair to say that de Botton was raised ‘rolling in it’ to use the common parlance. Like Day he achieved a double first in History, at Cambridge – a double starred first. So far as I can see, the only failure he has suffered is follicle.

 If you are more technically than philosophically inclined (but still keen to have your Marie Antoinette moment down there in the dust) there’s something called ‘Fuckup Nights’ where you can share your shame. ‘Fuckup Nights is a global series of events where we share business failure stories. Each month, at our events around the world, we get three or four people to face a room full of strangers to share their own fuckup. Stories of businesses that go bust, partnership deals that fall apart, products that have to be recalled – we tell it all!’ (Alright for some that they can afford multiple attempts at getting something right.) There’s a good amount of failure fetishisation in the entrepreneurial world too; Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure by Tim Harford, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success by Megan McArdle and Failing Forward by John C. Maxwell. Sweden even has has a Museum of Failure, which just seems like rubbing it in for such a wealthy, sexed-up, happy nation. I bet you won’t find anything like that in the developing world. Talking of which, the Wikipedia definition of a ‘Failed State’ makes grim reading.

What do these western failures have in common? They went on to succeed – but in a world where we are told to check our privilege, they want you to know that nothing was handed to them on a plate. Showing off about failure is another twist on virtue-signalling; I may be an ocean-going success, but I identify as a failure, so please don’t hate me. Like all virtue-signalling it’s deeply conservative as it seeks to maintain the status quo while making all the expected progressive noises. Here’s a thought; as social mobility – never going great guns – has been reversing so savagely in recent years, would these high-flyers consider spreading their glad tidings re:freedom through flopping around schools? Or might teachers attempting to raise up children destined for actual – not theoretical – failure see it as somewhat unhelpful? They could always test the water at Wimbledon High School, which had a ‘Failure Week’ some years back. The BBC reported at the time

The headmistress, Heather Hanbury, said she wanted to show “it is completely acceptable and completely normal not to succeed at times in life.” Ms Hanbury’s pupils achieve some of the highest exam scores – but from Monday they will be invited to focus on failure. There will be workshops, assemblies, and activities for the girls, with parents and tutors joining in with tales of their own failures. There will be YouTube clips of famous and successful people who have failed along the way and moved on.

Which sounds lovely and cosy – but I bet with fees of almost £8,000 a term for a senior at Wimbledon High, ‘Failure Week’ had better be matched by excellent exam results if parents are not to start asking exactly what they’re paying through the nose for.

Is what Elizabeth Day and her ilk do ‘humility’ – or is it humble-bragging? Or worse, is it using failure as a kind of exotic cos-play, the wearer knowing that it can be removed at a whim? In a world where failing is a heartbreaking norm – for millions of my fellow Britons, and for billions of people in this world – it seems somewhat grotesque. Such types like to think of themselves as  ‘empathic’ but I don’t find this lack of imagination about what real failure feels like ‘empathic’ at all. I can’t imagine how I’d feel as someone with no opportunities hearing a bunch of public schoolgirls and boys talking about being at ease with failure. But it would probably have something to do with the desire to chuck them under the aforesaid muck-cart.

When our compatriots are losing their lives to failure – including, I’d bet, individuals who could have had far more impressive careers as writers than the extremely mediocre Elizabeth Day, if only they’d been given the chance – there is something repulsive about this fetishisation of failure. Still, to be able to view human despair as something which can be lucratively spun into a lesson in personal growth suggests that as a thinker – if not as a very successful podcaster and after-dinner bloviator – Elizabeth Day certainly knows of what she speaks.