When we think of "success," what comes to mind? Money. A big house. A large office, maybe. Successful people have it all, right? The great job, the great car, the perfect family. That is success, perfection. Or at least that is what the modern individual most often thinks. A thought that often follows those of success is the thought of failure. Failure is the thing that haunts our nightmares and looms over us every day. The moment that we stop thinking about it, one of fellow paranoid people reminds us of it.
Failure is a concept that shakes our whole being. When something does not go the way we had hoped we, and everyone around us, ask what we did wrong that this happened. What did we do that we deserved to get laid off? What did we do wrong that our house burned down? Our fellow citizens agree that anything that goes wrong in our lives must have been caused by some action on our own part. This is a large shift from the former idea of Tragedy. If something is considered tragic, then it comes to the recipient through no fault of their own. Tragedy is not preventable. We cannot run from it anymore than we can run from the sunrise or the coming of a new day.
Failure is a concept that shakes our whole being. When something does not go the way we had hoped we, and everyone around us, ask what we did wrong that this happened. What did we do that we deserved to get laid off? What did we do wrong that our house burned down? Our fellow citizens agree that anything that goes wrong in our lives must have been caused by some action on our own part. This is a large shift from the former idea of Tragedy. If something is considered tragic, then it comes to the recipient through no fault of their own. Tragedy is not preventable. We cannot run from it anymore than we can run from the sunrise or the coming of a new day.