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Comment by timoth3y | Hacker News Reader

We seem to have come full circle with this "embrace failure" mantra. We now simply redefine small setbacks and inconveniences as "failure".

I attended an event put on by FailCon a few years ago. Every one of the speakers' "failures" was a humble brag about ow they bounced back from failure to achieve massive success. One speaker's failure was that he had to sell his company for only $90M.

The conference was a celebration of successful failures. I had fun, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Here's the thing. Real failure sucks. People you considered your friends stop returning calls. Doors close to you. You feel empty and lost. You can learn from it, but you can't celebrate it. Failure hurts. And that's OK. It's supposed to hurt.

If you can fail at something and it doesn't hurt, your heart really wasn't in it.

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> Failure hurts. And that's OK. It's supposed to hurt.

Indeed, emotions are there because make sense evolutionary. Defeat makes you more prone to stop trying things, to look around and see what you did wrong, to repeat the defeat in your head again and again. On the opposite, victory makes you more bold, to explore new paths, to attempt things that are, theoretically, out of your reach.

That's how I see it and makes a lot of sense to me.

Those talks at FailCon does sound like a humble brag. But some of the talks maybe came from a place to tell people that things do get better after hurting like hell.

I’ve had a failure where I honestly thought that my life was an unrecoverable failure and should end my life. (Not meeting toxic expectations set by family)

Looking back, I see how inconsequential that was, and I’m almost glad that happened. If I met my old self, I’d probably sound like one of those guys at FailCon to him.

I agree with you. If the talks had been about getting through failure, that it's OK and that this mess of conflicting emotions washing over you will pass, that some friends will drop you, but other will be more accepting than you can imagine, that might have had value.

But that would not have been fun.

Some speakers did talk briefly and vaguely about how hard it was for them, but quickly, cheerfully moved onto "but here is how I turned it into a huge success. You see, I'm a success. I'm not really a failure." (Not like you.)

I don't want to sound like I'm bashing the FailCon people. They all seemed nice, and I think their hearts really are in the right plaice. I just think that "celebrating failure" is wrong-headed.

In any event, that FailCon would have been a very dangerous place to be for someone who had just failed and was struggling to get through it.

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