Mental Gymnastics to Cope with Failure
Status is the water in which we swim. Our social standing, how we stack up against others — these are primal, deeply buried motivators.
Our choice of others, on inspection, is bizarre. There's no rational reason why we should compare ourselves to old friends, past classmates, and so on. Especially in school, we're grouped together by random chance and measured against Procrustean beds. Nobody was on the same starting line or had the same childhood circumstances; our only inarguable commonality is that we shared the same physical spaces for a period of time. Yet we act as if these people (who often exit our lives post-grad) are the benchmark to determine whether we're superior or inferior, ahead or behind.
The same logic applies to our current communities. Why should you compare yourself to friends, coworkers, or acquaintances you met for an hour at a party one time? We're all standing here because of a dice roll, not a scientific study. And sharing similarities with someone fails to make you comparable at a holistic level.
Our neverending elbowing, glancing about, and whispering to figure out where we stand on the totem pole is so deeply wired that nobody questions it. We treat envy and jealousy as fundamental, when they actually seem to be second-order effects of our incessant self-comparisons with arbitrary people.
Status anxiety is baked into our nerve endings. Our worst fear is being a "loser": someone who genuinely tries to achieve something, but flops. An artless attempt at humor, a failed business launch, or a too-vulnerable poem which elicits discomfort rather than sympathy; observors cringe (or are delighted) because they can feel the status loss happening in real time.
Humanity never grows out of its childhood playground cruelties. Whether fair or not, people will snicker at our perceived shortcomings — and we know it.
Our fear of losing face is thus so constant and fundamental that we take intensely emotional, near-mental-illness-like behaviors for granted:
People tend to socially hedge any endeavor which risks failure — not from humility, but rather to save face if things go wrong. A classic refrain when making an investment: "I'm buying this stock for fun!"
If someone does fail, they may feel the urge to double down. Admitting wrong-ness can feel like an admission of defeat, which feels worse than repeating perverse behavior. An extreme example is the 1954 UFO cult followers whose fervent proselytizing increased after zero UFOs materialized.
Blaming is a typical response to failure. Rather than accept the status-reducing narrative of being a loser, people try to shift responsibility.
When their plans don't work out, sometimes people can become:
intensely prideful
depressive and utterly crushed
actively bitter, acting like a crab-in-a-bucket who tries to prevent others from accomplishing things (because another's achievements would only underscore their failure by contrast and increase the status differential)
Once again, if these behaviors weren't so common, they'd probably be classified as mental illnesses. At minimum, these sorts of responses are self-defeating.
It's a sorry state of affairs, but there's no avoiding how things actually are. I'm wary of ideals or philosophies which pretend like we're not driven by protecting or gaining status — even to the point of performing perverse mental gymnastics.