Failures, Underdogs, and Comic Losers

Failures, Underdogs and Comic Losers

We all have lots of things we want to accomplish. Get a job, get married, be happy, make friends, wake up in time. These are our aspirations, things that give some sort of shape to our life—some sort of meaning even. Without them, our lives are prone to become directionless, and we seem to think that a good life has some sort of direction (Velleman, 1991). So that's how we start off. We have these aspirations. Now we are interested in the question of whether they come true. Will we succeed? Well, it depends on a lot of things. Do you have the potential? Do you work hard? Will you get lucky?

You might have the potential, but that's assuming a lot about what potential means (Masny, 2022). Does it mean you have the required ability to succeed? Or is it a threshold concept such that after a certain point of demonstrated competence you count as "having potential"? Or is it something that can only be retrospectively assessed, as when you hear in a documentary of a famous person, "I always knew that this kid would grow up to be a great swindler"? Simply trying is not enough, but it might be necessary. The point here is simply to say that we might have potential for success in our relative goals. But then, we might still fail. So you can ask another question: did you give it your all? Maybe, but it's hard to know what the cutoff for quitting is. Maybe we need to try more than once. Change your tactics. So, say you did. You might still fail. Well, maybe you just got unlucky. You had all the potential and the grit. You are just a victim of luck. You can rest now. Wait, if it's just luck, why not try again? Relying on luck is not necessarily gambling, is it? So goes the cycle.

This is what I have been thinking about recently. There has been much written about what makes a good life for someone. Understandably, the focus is usually on lives that have an upward trajectory. Someone grows up poor but through time, they overcome many odds and their lives get better. There is something interesting about these stories; they are uplifting and instructive. No wonder we tell them all the time. We also tell stories about lives that go downhill. A prince who loses all his fortune to gambling and drugs. These stories are also interesting in a different way; they are tragic and cautionary. Then there are all different variations of these, like stories of redemption. While I think these are important in our understanding of what makes a good life for a person—in other words, the prudential value of a life—I also think it is worth looking at cases where it does not work out for the person. By this, I don't mean someone who sits idly and does not have any hopes or aspirations. It is also not a call to start handing out trophies simply for trying. What is interesting to me is the question of how someone who keeps failing, or is and always will be an underdog, can live a good life.

Certainly, there are all kinds of values and virtues in life that have nothing to do with checking off a list of accomplishments—that life is not reducible to the aggregate of one's successes and failures. This is true, but also, we care about how our lives end up. So, at least derivatively, we care about being a winner or a loser. That is enough for motivating this line of questioning. Now, going back to the question: how can losers live a good life? I'll take a minor stab at an answer. Maybe just a poke. I think Nagel's The Absurd gives us a hint. He argues that absurdity arises from the discrepancy between our pretensions (or aspirations) and reality. It is the collision between the seriousness with which we take our lives and our permanent ability to view everything we’re serious about as arbitrary and open to doubt. How do you respond to this? Unlike Camus, who recommends heroic defiance, Nagel recommends irony. Nagel does not explain what he means by irony, but I think the suggestion is enough. And I think he is probably right. Or at least, for thinking about those of us who are losers. We are not on a hero’s journey. We are on a comic one. It is not us against the world; it is us in the world stumbling, slipping, getting back up, stumbling again. It is not necessarily someone who tries to make jokes out of every situation. The insufferable pretension of someone who wants to be funny. Expressions that end with literary—or, even more ghastly, literal—winks. But perhaps there is something tragically comical about that too. We are losers, but at least we are trying.

References

Masny, M. (2023). Wasted Potential: The Value of a Life and the Significance of What Could Have Been. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 51(1), 6–32.

Nagel, T. (1971). The Absurd. The Journal of Philosophy, 68(20), 716–727.

Velleman, J. D. (2015). Well-being and Time. In Beyond Price: Essays on Birth and Death (1st ed.). Open Book Publishers.

Contributor

Shishir Budha

CFCP Graduate Fellow