Failure.

This year I applied to around 15 universities to continue my studies. Where I got rejected from 8 universities at once yesterday, which was probably one of the biggest failures I would have faced in my life but oddly where other failures in my life have left me stumbling, gasping, resentful or jealous, this only strengthened my resolve to be better. Here I want to write what I learnt from it, hopefully you can learn somethings from what is basically a glorified journal entry too.

etymology

the word failure in its oldest word roots often comes from a feeling of stumbling or falling.

An interesting aside about the etymology is that somewhere along the line, the word which originally comes from stumbling or falling got related to self deception, trick, or be lacking. This is something I'll come back to later.

what it actually means in most circumstances

How does failure actually come about in today's world? Most often it comes about due to not performing upto a certain expectation, not getting selected for a certain position or something similar. The important thing to note here is that most institutions which return to us a judgement about our worth are not actually judging our worth. After all, how can someone who has never spent time with you or gotten to know you actually vouch for your character. What is actually being judged is a certain profile which they make you curate, either through some test or in many cases by actually putting the profile together. Your profile for that institution is simply the worth of the actions you undertook in some time frame evaluated with the criteria of the institution. These criteria treat you like an object because there is no time (or process, as far as I know) to evaluate the pure subjectivity an individual is.

This is a liberating and important realization. It stops the mechanism of the ego. In most cases, the ego perceives failure as an attack on its own legitimacy. It gives rise to feelings of resentment, self pity, regret, avoidance or anxiety to not confront the pure feeling of failure which bears upon you. 

The types of failure mentioned above are external but it is also possible to fail oneself internally. In a world where increasing proportions of people are addicted to something or the other to numb existential emptiness, it is easy to disappoint and hate oneself which leads to a feedback loop of hedonism. The insights about failure are still applicable to these types of "failures" though they form only a small aspect of dealing with them.

what failure DOES indicate

The judgement does indicate that you should look into your process of work if you want to achieve whatever it is that you wanted. We must have the humility to accept that if someone has knowledge, personality or a qualification we do not have, they must be doing or learning in a way that is different than us (and better, at least in the context of this evaluation). It indicates that your actions were ineffective, but still that doesn't justify regret which only succeeds in also ruining the present.

A question

Failing also raises many questions.

It asks you whether you are really a better person today than who you were yesterday.

It asks you whether you really worked your hardest for the test.

It asks you whether you can even become someone tomorrow.

It asks you to ask WHY? .

It asks you to ask why this always happens to you.

It asks you whether you even deserve to achieve whatever it is you wanted in the first place and perhaps most importantly (but this is a question which many never reach because the other questions tire us), 

What are you doing today, NOW to improve.

An interesting trend in these questions is that all these questions except the last one take you away from this moment.

Feelings

On closer examination, I found that the feeling of failure doesn't really hurt too much. The feeling of failure isn't the torrential downpour of regret, guilt, self hate, avoidance or anxiety you must have experienced sometime.

No, in its purest form, the feeling of failure is what you feel after giving your best at a sport but losing to someone else who also gave their best. In my experience, all the other accompanying feelings are impressions of a past which become ignited by an ego which wants to run away from the present moment. Self Hatred, Self pity, anxiety, regret and guilt are just narcissistic vanities. 

Somewhere along the line, we became dominated by our egos and started thinking that self deception was the only reason for someone to fall down. Though self deception is an important problem that needs to be confronted in its own right, it is hubris to consider that we are more than babies at a geological, much less a cosmological time scale. Stumbling is how babies learn how to walk and failure is the currency of evolution, yet we are prideful enough to think that failure only comes from self deception. Self deception is itself the mechanism by which this primacy has been provided to itself. It is nothing but the ego running away from confronting feelings which sublate it.

conclusion

Failing hurts.

If we confront it head on then it hurts a little but then the feeling flowers and withers away, leaving beautiful insight behind. Most people are unable to do so. This is because confronting failure is a process that sublates the ego and is hence something it opposes.

It tries many tactics such as making you afraid to try things again, putting you into an unending cycle of questions about why (someone thought) you were not good enough, making you regret your past and feel that you never did your best, making you collect sympathy from others for how difficult your life is, making you hate and devalue yourself so that you feel like you never deserved something in the first place etc. The trick utilized depends on how one's brain has been conditioned and are things that need to be dealt with in their own right, but at the end of the day, they are still just tricks. They need to be seen for what they are (and dealt with) and the enrichment inherent in failure must be realized.

Failure in itself is that archetypal experience (or maybe I watch too much shonen anime) of two opposing sides pitted in a dance of self actualization. When it ends, it does require one side to be labelled a loser, but the label becomes almost unimportant. Though it hurts to try your best and still come up short, it is something that rises and goes away rather easily. What is left in both sides is gratitude towards the other for having helped them improve.