Rather Suspect

Yesterday I was walking in the park while listening to Wilco’s album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. There’s a haunting section at the end of the song Poor Places where a woman’s voice repeats, over-and-over, the album’s title.

Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot.

Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot.

These words are, of course, taken from radio transmission military call signs — YHF.

You. Have. Failed.

Lately I’ve been thinking about that word, failure. It’s gotten corrupted (as with so many things) by Silicon Valley. Fail faster, they say. Failure is part of the process. Celebrate your failures.

But implied in those statements is not a true acknowledgment of failure. Instead, that’s failure as catchphrase, failure as an advertising quip. Failure is cute when the “story of failing” is told by someone who’s succeeded. Haha, they say. You see? The path to success isn’t a straight line. You have to fail a few times too! Put that into your project plan: fail here, here, and here. And then succeed.

But as I listened to that phrase — yankee…hotel…foxtrot — it came across like a command. Regardless of what you attempted, regardless of what you thought the outcome would be, you did not achieve that goal. You. Have. Failed.

I have failed. I am failing. I will fail.

In that moment I thought: okay, let’s not see failure as a negative. But let’s not do that shallow Silicon Valley trick where we just package failure up into something we can sell on the path to success. Let’s accept failure for what it is: the natural outcome of everything and everyone. Not a negative, not a positive, just reality. Entropy, perhaps.

Everything we do, everything we attempt, everything we try: we will fail. Not just in the short-term, not in the sense of stubbing our toe here and there. Everything we create — from the pyramids to the Great Wall of China to the Roman Empire to the United Nations — will fail. Sooner or later, they will all fall into ruin. Every breathe we take brings us one step closer to bodily failure. Every interaction in every relationship is a step ultimately towards grief.

We are literally designed to fail. Which means every day we aren’t succeeding, aren’t achieving. We are failing.

But then what? Perhaps, rather than rage against the inevitable, we can use this idea to approach the world differently. We can enter into everything with a sort-of peaceful nihilist’s mind: this will fail, and this will fail, and this will fail — but despite that, I’ll do them all just the same.

This won’t work, but I’ll try it anyway. You might betray me, but I will trust you anyway. You will leave, but I will love you anyway.

In a sense it’s maybe a turn on Bartleby who infuriates with the phrase “I would prefer not to.” Instead we say: “it’s foolish to do it — but I’ll do it just the same.”

The decision point for anything then becomes not: should I try to achieve this? Instead it transforms into: this ultimately won’t work — and I know that — but is it worth doing just the same?