Become Gold

We all have goals. And we all want to achieve them. In doing so, we constantly, and naturally, avoid what holds us back and gravitate towards what helps us. And I think a good attitude is one of these things that we gravitate towards. That is, how we interpret situations with a positive outlook and attitude.

Over time, I think what we perceive becomes something that we automatically interpret. One thing that I noticed is how we perceive failure. In our determined unyielding pursuit, we tend to rationalize what we fail at with a positive outlook. What I mean is, for better or for worse, we tend to not see failure as failure—and only failure—but as something, even partly, positive.

As in if there is some redeemable quality to it. I have my own assumptions as to why this is the case, but whatever the reason may be, I don’t think I am alone when I say that people try extra hard to see a silver lining in every mishap.

Don’t believe me? Ok, how many times have you seen people rationalize failure as part of the process, a necessary step in the grand journey to their destination? How many times have you seen people rationalize failure as an experience that taught them valuable lessons? I am sure I would not be incorrect if I were to say that you find yourself making such rationalization as well. Am I correct?

Now, this may be true. In fact, failure is often a necessary step, no doubt about that. And furthermore, it often does indeed come with many valuable lessons to be learned, and I am not denying this. But that is beside the point I am trying to make here.

I noticed that people have this need to rationalize failures as something positive in some way, shape, or form, regardless of whether or not such a rationalization is true and valid.

Going back to the concept of a good attitude, the idea that how we see what we see is one of the many things that are used to achieve our goals.

Furthermore, it would not be surprising at all if it were the case that people have this rationalizing attitude always on hand and ready to for action because deep down, they are not able to bear the possibility that sometimes, failure—be it in the form of a tragedy, a mistake, poor performance, what have you—is nothing but failure, and that the struggle was for nothing.

In fact, I think it is the possibility of redemption that keeps us going after every setback because, with the chance of redemption, we will be able to justify our struggle. But will we be able to continue the fight once we realize that this struggle and all the sacrifice that comes with it will amount to no victory and no chance for justification?

When people make the rationalization that whatever adversity they failed to overcome was a valuable experience in one way or another, I am willing to make the bet that at some level, unconscious or otherwise, they do so because they would not be able to endure the pain of realizing that their failure was just a failure and nothing else.

No silver lining, and no salvageable aspect to it. No chance for any optimistic rationalization that our attitude can conjure up.

And let me ask you, as you have undoubtedly gone through tough times before: will you be able to keep the fight going when the day comes that after all that struggle, you find yourself reaching an endeavor in which you realize that there is in fact, no salvageable aspect to it?

What will become of you when your positive thinking fails you? Will you fail to move past the failure that begets no silver lining?

I think about the day when we do reach that grand failure. The failure that has no prospect of being a part of the process when the last hope of rationalizing it as a step in the journey is stripped away.

When it is a dead end, with no ripe lessons to be learned, and no patterns to be found after spending ages trying to piece together the clues. In such states of despair, after realizing that our sacrifices were in vain, we see that void in front of us.

Ominously taunting us in silence. We stand before it, staring deep into the black wall of nothingness. It calls us, those who lost all hope of redemption, to enter.

The problem isn’t that there is no silver lining. It is that we expected some silver lining (often in the form of meaningfulness) in the first place. When meaning is expected, it becomes a cope. This is the downfall of every existentialist.

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They would tell you to create meaning because life is meaningless. I would tell you to create meaning, and by the way, life is meaningless.

Gold needs no silver lining. We must do for the sake of doing, and what is done and gone is done and gone.

What if you could live without expecting redemption? What if you could fail without having to compulsively see some salvation in your failures. What if we didn’t need to have meaning? Only then can one’s life truly be meaningful.

Gold needs no silver lining. Become Gold.

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