A new book, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, explores failure as a condition, a natural result of ordinariness. Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post quotes from Scott Sandage’s book a passage so seemingly obvious it makes you wonder how no one before now has written this:

“Failure had become modern, a low hum rather than a loud crash. It meant a fragmented life, not necessarily a shattered one. Anyone could be a failure if that identity required utter stagnation instead of outright misfortune. By the time Mark Twain imagined Tom and Huck fading away ‘under the mold,’ the American idea of failure centered on problems recognizably our own: aimlessness, routine, stress, conformity, loss of individuality, the dead-end job, the disgrace of being ‘merely’ average. Losers plodded their lives away in offices, factories and boardrooms.”

Vinnee Tong