The Value of Failure

This essay is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license.

Prelude: An Ethos

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

This is a phrase that is usually shorthand for “in a capitalist system, the surplus value workers produce is given to shareholders as profit and dividends, rather than being directly returned to those who produce it; therefore, all consumption inherently steals from someone”. I don’t have a source for that; I made it up. Go read Marx or something. I sort of agree with this, but I’m a dirty neoliberal globalist Aristotelian¹ shill who seeks to invert words and make them lose their meaning. I think investors contribute value by supplying capital, and that the phrase “hoarding money in the stock market” is inherently an oxymoron because any money invested in the stock market gets used on capital funding and allocation, which actually does something unlike stuffing all your money under a mattress, but how capital should be allocated is a debate for people with more time on their hands. I’m just here to present a corollary.

I think piracy is morally acceptable under nearly all circumstances. Yes, even toward indie studios. If you agree with the first statement, you should agree with this one too! In any studio that isn’t a worker’s co-op, as in most studios, there is profit being made, and that profit may not be seen by the developers aside from the wages they get paid, which would have been the same regardless. If you’re buying a game, it’s usually the publisher that gets the largest cut, not the developer! Every time I hear about someone buying the latest Disney product because they want to support the artists behind it, I remind them those artists are getting the exact same wages whether or not they buy the product. Those artists are still subject to the whims of the higher-ups, and you buying the thing they helped work on will not materially help them. The mystical energy and power of fandom did not save 82 staffers from being laid off in the Warner Brothers CN Studios merger. It did not save Rooster Teeth employees from being underpaid in a terrible working environment. It did not save the voice actor for Bayonetta from being offered $4,000 for voicing the titular character in a multi-million dollar franchise’s third game. Yes, she’s already in a union. They do a lot, and you should join one, but they can only do so much. There’s been more info about the Bayonetta situation; she was offered more than that, but I can’t constantly keep this updated with the back-and-forth. Don’t even get me started on the remnants of the Harry Potter fandom who still buy the latest products yet “separate the art from the artist”; it’s not like J. K. Rowling’s being separated from her money just because you said that!

“But Jerry,” you implore, “think of the time and effort and resources that went into the art! Isn’t it fair to pay it back?” If it were on an individual level, yes, but we live in an age where books, videos, games, and nearly all forms of art can be replicated endlessly and experienced at minimal cost. I refuse to spend my money on things that have already been made, could be accessed, and are being withheld from me solely because I have not paid for the right to lay my eyes upon them. Before I am accused of being a typical techbro (feminine or gender-neutral) who seeks to devalue art and run artists’ lives forever, I will note that this includes software. This applies to software the most. Software developers have figured this out, and many major projects such as Blender, GIMP, Musescore, Krita, and Linux are released under the GNU GPL, which is a license that permits anyone to view the source code of the project under it for free, make modifications to the code, and distribute those modifications under the same license.² Major corporations such as Microsoft and Google have spent billions in research, development, and most egregiously, legal work, to try and circumvent the license. The open ethos behind this license has advanced computing by decades, and contributes to a strong open-source community that lasts on sites such as Github and Gitlab to this day. If you are an artist and you are interested, a similar license is the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, which allows people to modify your work and distribute it under the same license. There are various other licenses that restrict commercial access, but this is the one that is most similar to the GNU GPL.

If you really want to support artists, which is a good thing, pay money to them directly. If something so deeply moves you as to take out your wallet, direct your money toward the artists that made the thing, not the publisher who copies it onto your screen. Otherwise, your financial gesture is purely symbolic. If you’re feeling especially daring, commission them directly. Bring something new into this world with all the money you saved from not buying things that already exist. Be the mover of capital Marx predicted the downfall of and modern-day Marxists despise. Return economic power into your own hands!³

Opening: Failure

One fails forward toward success.

I guess “starting with a quote and explaining it in the first full paragraph” is my brand now. This quote’s allegedly by Charles Kettering, an inventor and former head of research at General Motors. There are dozens of quotes like it that have the central message of repeated failure being a necessary step on the road to greatness and success, they’re all over the internet. Cynically, they’re a great way to distract you from the material conditions you’re in, but I honestly think they have a point, and it took me too long to internalize it.

I was a gifted kid in elementary school. You may now roll your eyes and vomit into the nearest waste receptacle. Dare I say it, I was also a gifted kid in middle school, and a top honors kid in high school, and the only reason I’m finally in a place where I’m merely above average instead of exceptional is because I go to a top university. I just finished a midterm I’m pretty sure I could get full marks on and I’m riding on the high. Being told you’re great just for existing and “being so smart” all the time as a kid is a great way to boost your ego. However, it makes you afraid of failure.

I was taking an in-class geography quiz in 4th grade, and got a question wrong due to misunderstanding the options. I cried at my desk over a single multiple-choice question with no stakes because my identity was momentarily shattered. Nobody else was being mean to me in this moment; I was the meanest to myself. In 5th grade, math became advanced enough that I understood the concepts, but began making mistakes through my sloppy work process. I always knew how to multiply 4-digit by 4-digit numbers, or multiply with fractions and decimals; the actual arithmetic was trivial. However, because I wanted to get the work done as fast as possible, I never bothered checking it, and my grades on my homeworks were a very consistent 8-9/10, and tests were much worse, though I always managed to get a 90 on the final somehow. I took this as a personal affront. I justified every low grade as “merely a mistake”, yet fudged my way into honors classes because of my mastery of concepts and high standardized test scores. Failure was not an option; I never failed, and if I did, it didn’t matter, because it was merely a clerical error. Because of this, for a long while, I never learned.

Up until high school, I associated myself with things I was good at. If there was something I wasn’t good at, such as running or drawing, I ridiculed them publicly as lesser hobbies, because my standardized math test scores were clearly more important. However, the idea that I was still bad at something frustrated me; I thought I deserved to be good at everything, and that I had to. The idea that I couldn’t run fast, or draw well, frustrated me. Both those things take practice and pacing, things I couldn’t handle.

In middle school, I decided I wanted to draw. I was in communities online that valued artists, and I wanted to be valued. I wanted to be cool like them, and show them the awesome ideas I had in my head. I looked up “how to draw anime” and followed the video tutorials I found through rote memorization; no learning of the underlying fundamentals, only anime. I wanted the end result without the work that goes into it. My proportions were consistently off because I never learned them; I drew characters with bodies as tall as only three heads and as thin as one, near stick-figures, because I couldn’t plan. I didn’t want to, I didn’t think it mattered.

Also in middle school, I took up composition. This came later than drawing, and I saw it as a lesser skill simply because at the time, I valued visual art more than music. I would have rather looked at something cool than heard something cool. Spoiler alert, I’m still a composer (occasionally) now; obviously my tastes have changed. I just wanted to show off to internet people and my band teachers. However, as I wrote music, I found that I was more willing to plan. I was more willing to think before I wrote; so willing, in fact, that I became insufferable about music theory in high school. I wanted to compose to hear cool music at the end, but I started to value composing for the sake of composing, rather than just for the end product. I never found that spark in drawing.

When I was 15, I was on a very long car ride with nothing to do. I brought along my sketchbook because I wanted to try and see if I could draw something cool. I still had no knowledge of fundamentals, nor any willingness to practice them. I only knew how to draw basic animation-stylized faces in 3/4 profile. I drew Pidge Gunderson from Voltron, a gender icon. It took me longer than it should have because I was trying to reconstruct a finished piece without the lineart that goes into it, on a micro-scale (using a tiny bit of the page). When I was finally happy enough, I traced over the exterior in pen, labeled it just in case someone was confused at what the hell I just drew, and signed it. I thought about it for days afterward, and decided I would never draw again.

This seems antithetical to the point of the section, right? What I left out is that I was still composing. I loved to write music and I loved to study music; through high school, I strove to write for different ensembles, and ended up writing for a full wind ensemble at 17. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, the road to my success was paved with all my failures, all the musical sketches on my hard drive I never showed anyone, all the old pieces I hid in shame and no longer think about, all the moments in my old music that make me cringe and think “wow, I could have done that better”. Music was something I felt comfortable failing at, and when I finally realized it at the end of high school, I learned from my mistakes more than ever.

There’s an archetype called the “former gifted kid” that gets ridiculed on the internet. The stereotype is that they were considered “gifted” in elementary school before their grades dropped in middle school, and they’re still struggling to pick up the pieces after graduating. In my arrogant opinion, they deserve ridicule. The idea of being seen as “gifted” and getting put into a “gifted program” is something that commonly gets awarded to children who are privileged for various reasons in the first place, whether it be because their parents are upper-middle class or white or Asian. “Gifted programs” often function as de facto racial segregation within an integrated school district.⁴

Getting past systemic issues, building your identity around a category you were assigned in elementary school shows an unwillingness to fail. Some “former gifted kids” recognize this, and remind themselves and others to not let perfect become the enemy of good, but the ultimate goal of a “former gifted kid” should be to move past the label altogether, because if a label from elementary school cuts that deeply into adulthood, perhaps they have other issues they should take care of. Maybe if a gifted kid was taught not to fail, a “former gifted kid” still won’t fail, and will instead attribute their mistakes to them being a “former gifted kid”. A gifted kid must fail first to succeed; that’s what separates a gifted kid from a future honors student, and an honors student from a future exemplary adult.

Intermezzo: On Science

Most people aren’t scientists. Most people aren’t required to be. That’s fine, because science is demoralizing. It’s not mixing two random chemicals together and watching them change color and explode; it’s poring over theories of chemical-mixology, asking if these two specific chemicals will raise temperature by 0.3 degrees if mixed together, mixing them together in a highly-controlled environment, and monitoring a thermometer. Michael Strevens⁵ puts forth in The Knowledge Machine that the development of science is irrational, it’s a fluke. No sane person would apply deductive reasoning to nearly all observable phenomena, yet this is how we made the greatest advancements in the past few centuries.

Another misconception is that science is when you observe the world, make a theory about it, and then go back to sleep. That’s philosophy, which wishes it was science. A slightly more subtle misconception is that science is about testing different cases and “proving” a theory by finding the cases that support it. This is backwards. Let’s talk about what science actually is.

Karl Popper thinks science is about what can be falsified, rather than what can be verified. I’m inclined to agree with Karl Popper. Immediately before Karl Popper, the prevailing school of thought in the philosophy of science was logical positivism, which held that the only meaningful statements are those which can be verified, or proven true. “All swans are white” is a scientific theory that states, self-evidently, that every swan has white feathers. However, we can’t know if we found every swan. The existence of all swans found so far being white doesn’t prove all swans are white, it only proves every swan we found so far is white. As it turns out, not all swans are white. What if we looked at it from the perspective of falsificationism? We can’t prove all swans are white, but we can disprove it by finding a black swan, pointing to it, and saying “look! Not all swans are white!”.

The full scientific process is to observe the world, form an initial theory, form hypotheses that would necessarily be implications of that theory, and test those hypotheses. If they are correct, the theory works for now. If they are incorrect, then this counts as a new observation, which demands a new theory. A scientific theory can never truly be proven; only falsified!

Creationism, specifically Young Earth Creationism, is the idea that a god, specifically the Christian god, created the universe about 6,000 years ago over a span of seven days in a process that was described very literally in the Bible, in Genesis 1. The only part of this theory that’s falsifiable, and hence scientifically meaningful, is that the universe was created 6,000 years ago. We have geological, biological, chemical, and astronomical evidence that the universe is much older than 6,000 years old. The common response to this evidence by creationists is the Omphalos theory, which suggests that their god, all-knowing and all-powerful, merely created the world fully-formed with the illusion of age to deceive the unbelievers, who will be sent to a dimension of eternal torture after their death for their thought-crimes. This is not a falsifiable statement, because by their own admission, their god cannot be observed. Hence, they may rest eternally smug and assured of their own correctness, because they can never be proven wrong. Evolution, however, can be. All we have to do is find evidence that everything we found so far relating to the fossil record, natural and artificial selection, and the way DNA works is miscontextualized. It just takes one piece of contradictory evidence to collapse the whole theory! That’s why, in a creationist’s mind, creationism is more correct than evolution.

Notice how ridiculous this is. Creationism doesn’t make meaningful discoveries or inferences, it merely exists to confirm what a creationist already believed. Creationism isn’t only not right, it’s not even wrong! In order for science to work, science has to fail. It has to find the edge cases in order to build newer and better theories. Though journals are loath to admit it, negative results are just as important, and sometimes more important, than positive results. In order to be scientific, a theory has to be falsifiable, and in order to be built upon, a theory has to be falsified, not just verified. This is why we test theories; to confirm what we know and find what we don’t. Every failure is a success.

Finale: The Idea Guy

For the final section, I will make up a strawman and then destroy it. That’s another on-brand thing I do.

I met a bunch of different people, and as a human being, I subconsciously search for patterns. I end up categorizing them into boxes. I try not to categorize them anymore, because that’s rude, and I’m always looking for the person who refuses to be put in a box. I have multiple mental boxes for people who refuse to be put into boxes, and I’m looking for someone who jumps out of those. My categories are no longer derogatory; I like to talk to many different types of people and hear their viewpoints. Even if someone’s viewpoint is an actively toxic one I already heard, I may take the time to poke at it if I deem it’s worth it before moving on. I like cultivating interesting social environments of people who like to hold discussions about anything and everything. I like it when people agree with me, and I like it when people disagree with me, for different reasons. I genuinely believe everyone who has a creative spark and puts it to good use, whether through art or science, is doing something worthwhile.

The idea guy, however, isn’t.

The idea guy is one of the lowest forms of human. The idea guy lurks on the internet, witnessing the works of those who dared to make art, and simply assumes that those artists are better than them. The idea guy slinks to his corner where they may receive attention and pity. The idea guy tells you they have an artistic career too, they’re just biding their time, or too shy or humble to show off. The idea guy is inspired, but not inspired enough to actually do anything, just inspired enough to idolize their artistic inspirations and tell you about them.

The idea guy tells you about their ideas. They’re grandiose, pie-in-the-sky ideas that will never see fruition. Everyone has them, and that’s fine, but the idea guy is entirely convinced their ideas are possible and merely just out of reach. The idea guy just needs to find the right person to “help them” execute their ideas, such as an hour-long animated epic about their original worldbuilding that isn’t at all based on anything related to George Lucas or J. R. R. Tolkien or George R. R. Martin or Andrew Hussie. They’re a bit short on cash right now though, so if you do anything for the idea guy, you aren’t getting paid.

The idea guy might have tried to make a video game. They were so inspired when they pretended to play an Earthbound ROM at the age of 13 that they downloaded Unity or Game Maker and opened up the program once. They quickly realized this would involve coding. They were disgusted, and closed the program. Maybe they’ll return to it when they get their creativity back. After all, art to the idea guy is made of pure inspiration. They just need to wait for it to strike them, then they’ll make their JRPG for real, and it won’t be anything like OMORI or Undertale!

The idea guy may be in their mid-20s and living in their parents’ basement; not because the housing market’s terrible and the rental market’s worse, but because they never even tried to find a source of income. Independence is meaningless to them; they’re too busy coming up with ideas to think about it.

When asked about fundamentals, the idea guy will scoff at you. They will claim that they, above all, are creative, and reducing themself to mere fundamental studying of their art forms will reduce their creativity. That’s why they can’t study music theory, or art fundamentals, or character arcs, because they’re just waiting for raw inspiration, the source of all things good, to strike them and hand them the finished product. Either that, or they’re studying their fundamentals so hard that they fail to deliver anything original; after all, not enough inspiration yet. The idea guys I met seem to think that the highest form of creativity always takes the form of JRPGs and their music from the 1990s, and random subculture music from the past decade.

I realized something, though; there are people who fit all of the above criteria at some point or another, yet still manage to make something of themselves in the end. They escape the realm of idea guy and become artists. Where is that point? Who is the idea guy, really, if not an artist?

My mental conception of a successful artist, or at least my favorite type to talk to that seems to be doing well for themself, is someone who loves art for art’s sake, and finds fulfillment through their work. Fame is optional; it gets to some peoples’ heads and makes them unapproachable, mostly because they have fans and idea guys clamoring at their feet for a taste of their clout. I just want to talk. I admire the saxophonist who started a jazz club in his apartment to create a space for an artistic niche where there wasn’t one. I admire the former film student who did it all, acting, writing, directing, and producing, and decided to go into 3D modeling and video-editing instead, finding his career through those. I admire the novelist-turned-game-dev who weaves their ethos into everything they touch, who wants to remind a sleepy, dulled audience what it means to be queer. I admire the artist who draws what she loves, blind to the cares of anyone else. I don’t idolize them, though, but we’ll get to that later.

My original idea was that all of these people are simply “type A” personalities, prone to ambition, except instead of going to medical school, they’re interested in art. Aside from the issue of categorizing personalities in that manner,⁶ I quickly realized this would be playing into the idea guy’s own self-mythos. Rather, I think what they have in common is they’re willing to fail.

Each of these artists loves what they do, and had a bunch of tiny, manageable projects they built up before anything that they’d show off to other people and an idea guy would lap up. In some of these cases, I got to witness the evolution of the artist before they reached that stage, which in itself is a vague boundary. Some idea guys are only enthralled by Toby Fox.

Each of these artists has refined their art through practice, sometimes private, sometimes public. They put their work out, and have even more work behind the scenes. Though the reaction of the crowd is nice, and may sometimes make them money, they are primarily unfazed; no other career would satisfy them. Most of all, they have failed. They, too, have made things they’re not proud of. You’ll never get to see them, and if you do, you’ll never get to hear them in the context of an “artist’s failure” except in the rare “artist’s retrospective” article. The idea guy doesn’t want to fail. They just want to think about their epic idea in their head and materialize it through inspiration. They want to take a drawing, ignore the linework, and grab ahold of the finished product.

A better-case scenario for the idea guy is they haven’t found what they want to fail at yet. Maybe they’re so obsessed with drawing that they haven’t considered composition, writing short stories, or recording or editing videos and movies. Their current obsession is a temporary hangup; they’ll get over it and find their true passion, not one they have to “wait for inspiration” for, but one they’re actively willing to fail toward, one that they think about doing in their spare time, not just thinking about… thinking about it.

Another better-case scenario is that the idea guy lacks structure. This is probably the most common case; given a push in the right direction, they could become a business major (idea guys in suits that make money), or even abandon the mentality altogether and become a scientist or mathematician, if they get over their fear of either. The idea guy often doesn’t think they like math or science. Granted, they probably wouldn’t like science if they remain an idea guy, considering all the failing science involves. The idea guy might even be a former gifted kid, stuck in the middle school conceptions of what math and science are. School math is about computations, multiplying 4-digit numbers together, solving quadratic equations with a formula, and the dreaded precalculus, which is a bunch of unrelated topics you may never get taught the meaning behind, but university math and beyond is about proofs, creativity, interconnectedness, and logic! School science is about memorizing facts, but PhD science is about using the scientific method to find new results (though sometimes, school science gets close)! The idea guy fell off in 7th grade, though, so they can’t tell you about either, and will react with fear and loathing when they encounter them.

The idea guy’s always been around in various forms, before Undertale, before Earthbound, and even before the personal computer. Before the wackiness that is 2022, there was Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche was a prominent conspiracy theorist from the 70s until his death in the 2010s, and his views are still propagated by a set of devoted disciples. Among them are theories that nearly all bad events in recent history were caused by an evil drug cabal run by the British Empire and headed by Queen Elizabeth II, and in order to save the world, the US needs to ally with Russia and China immediately to produce nuclear fusion technology that will launch humanity into a new age where they can enjoy science and art without labor. Also, climate change is fake and made up by environmentalists trying to hold back the nuclear fusion infinite energy utopia. This is what he actually believed.

The crux of his philosophy was that even before the evil British drug cabal, all of philosophy and civilization is a conflict between the Platonists, who gave us good things such as Mozart, Beethoven, facts, and logic, and value reason, truth, and ideas, versus the Aristotelians, who gave us evil things such as postmodernism, uncertainty, moral relativism, and worst of all, jazz music, and value empirical data and testability. LaRouche clearly valued the Platonists, and considered himself their heir.

This is where I stake my claim: I am an Aristotelian! I love and value jazz music, science, postmodernism, empiricism, falsificationism, the unknown, sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. LaRouche is an idea guy, a Platonist; they value the idea of art, the idea of truth, but will never find either, because they’re too busy smoking weed all the time, or if they can’t afford that, getting high off their own ego. The idea guy is a creationist; they will never be right or wrong, because they will never say or do anything of meaning. The idea guy is a former gifted kid; they will forever rest on their few laurels awarded to them by other people long ago, but will never make anything meaningful for themselves. The only way for an idea guy to save themself is to fail, to stop being an idea guy.

If the Aristotelians, the artists, are the wheat, the Platonists, the idea guys, are the chaff. This metaphor goes slightly deeper than the old proverb; to separate the wheat that gets ground into bread from the chaff that doesn’t, you allow the wind to blow away the chaff, which is the outer hull of the grain. Artists are the wheat; idea guys are blown whichever way the wind takes them. I don’t idolize any of the artists from earlier; I’ve seen their human sides, and I’ve been human alongside them. However, I respect them greatly as friends, as well as many others I can’t mention because this essay’s long enough, and I love to follow my own artistic journey, meeting with them to share where we’ve been and what we’ve done. Though I fear I have been an idea guy, the idea guys have been nowhere; I no longer wish to associate with them, and I try my best to avoid being one of them. Fundamentally, I want to fail. I want to fail so hard and so many times that I succeed through the magnitude of my failures. I want to be and be with people who are willing to fail, and who are willing to let me fail with them. Art is a game with no stakes and I love to play it, because there, it is OK to fail! It's encouraged to fail! Through our failures, we live, and we succeed!

Here is my last drawing. It sucks, and that’s why it’s here.