Trivium 21c

It seems yesterday, October 13th was the ‘International Day for Failure‘. I mean, is this a hoax? A joke? I failed to notice, which, I suppose is apt. I did attend a Parents Evening and would not have celebrated if I’d heard tale upon tale of failure from the teachers, which would not be the point… I should’ve been celebrating the FAIL.

I am getting quite sick and tired of international days of whatever… like, I mean… ‘whatevs’ like… Can’t we just have our calendar back without having to come up with some good cause or other? In a secular world with no Saints days some people seem to think we would be bored without a cause tweeted into our timelines to retweet and get on our high horse about for a few minutes… seconds…

But…

Failure! Not content with just naming a day the organisers (who seem to be Finnish) give you hints on failure: “Fail. How? Just fail. You’ll find your own personal way to do it.” Yes, like vagrancy perhaps? Because this cause of celebrating failure is one that is always trumpeted by the successful who seem to want to devote their lives to telling you that the secret of their success was their failure. I doubt it. I expect the secret of success is success. No amount of celebrating grit, determination, strength in adversity will convince me otherwise. Failure is miserable, it might be one step closer to success but it also might be one step closer to yet more failure and those who have failed most will not spend October 13th celebrating misery.

It is the successful who will be celebrating failure day with a patronising nod and wink to those in the gutter ‘Hey look at the stars!!!’ they might say… or ‘look at me!!!!’ ‘I’m a multimillionaire, but I once was a failure just like you! But I stuck with it and didn’t give up and NOW LOOK AT ME! AT ME!!!!”

And let’s have lots of quotes from successful people saying how they failed. If they truly failed how many demotivational quotes could we stomach?

Isn’t it ironic that this day has been put together by the Finns 

and, in particular, Pasi Sahlberg? If Finland had been at the bottom of the international tables for all of time I wonder if Mr Sahlberg would have such attention? No, because success has driven his exposure.

Now, of course we can all come up with moments of failure and some moments of success but let us not fetishise one over the other, it’s all about being human and rather than one leading to the other we should treat those two imposters just the same.

So, please, no failure day and no, no success day neither…