A toast to all the rejects | Hacker News Reader

A toast to all the rejects

theatlantic.com

60 pointswallflower23 comments

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.

> 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.

> Three years later, Sarnecka threw the Mount Olympus–themed rejection party in Vickers’s honor—Vickers had finished her Ph.D. in ancient Greek philosophy and was moving on from UC Irvine.

They seem to be doing OK.

Emphatically encourage others to RTFA before upvoting TFA.

I won’t flag it, but the author doesn’t seem like an actual reject, and thus it’s pure clickbait.

I feel like I was a true and legitimate reject, at least throughout my youth and tweens. I know in the core of my soul that real rejects would never include casual humble brags about PHDs while claiming to understand or have learned what it’s like to be rejected by The System and/or society.

Getting rejected by Stanford, Harvard, UCs or whatever, doesn’t count in my book. People in these buckets rarely, if ever, fall far from The Tree of Thine Holy Kingdom. Real rejects don’t have the resources of the elite ruling class.

Proposed improved HN time sinks for today:

1. Read the comments and links in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30039597 (though not the actual post linking to Twitter, it’s pointless and hopefully dang will update it).

2. The Steak Article, lol: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30041026

I’m such a slob

I know I am weak

I only worked out five times this week

I’m such a knob

I’m filled with self-hate

My brother speaks nine languages while I only speak eight

It's all relative.

Going to the gym every day gives you exposure to the people who work out every day and do it like they're fighting for their lives.

All of a sudden showing up and doing a couple squats doesn't feel as impressive :)

Yeah but while in the gym looking up at the fighters and the more progressed, you can't see the thousands of people sitting at home on the lounge all day long.

Don't always compare up.

Work out and do steroids, that's how you get looking like that.

No kidding:

  More than 100 rejections. Grants, journal articles, fellowships—you name it, they’d been denied it.

Being in the social strata where your rejections are effectively failed subsidies is not really the place to complain about how hard done by you are (I'm in the same class). I'd be much more interested in something written by eg a salesperson who sees constant rejection and has to handle it live, vs some academics emailing in applications and then having a toga party when they are not successful.

My advice to anyone who identifies with the article is to get out of a academia for a while to change your perspective. There is a whole world out there

> More than 100 rejections. Grants, journal articles, fellowships—you name it, they’d been denied it.

Sounds exactly like my time trying to date in college.

Or anyone looking for an apartment where I live

The reliability and legitimacy of The Atlantic gets worse and worse. The Left lean doesn't bother me at all. The shameless elitist disconnect is unacceptable.

If you are interested in knowing the stories of the true rejects of the world, I encourage following the YouTube channel Soft White Underbelly: https://www.youtube.com/c/SoftWhiteUnderbelly

While failures are often worth celebrating (don't fear failure, learn from your mistakes, etc) there's a line there somewhere where this type of "toast to the rejects" can cross over into something else. Sour grapes? "I didn't want that stupid grant anyway!"

Failure is a loaded word. It should be expected that you don't achieve your desired outcome with many things in life. The real problem is a generation of people have been raised to be entitled.

Well, the _real_ problem isn't just that they've been raised in a way that leads to entitlement, but that what they have been taught to feel entitled to was actually a pipe dream.

While the boomers were all busy buying property and starting businesses, they were also unwittingly making it impossible for their descendants to do the same (or to the same extent) whilst in the same breath telling them (perhaps in honest belief) that they too could have anything they wanted.

Setting the bar so high makes even slight failures hit that much harder.

How did boomers make it impossible to do the same? Real estate is unaffordable, boomers refuse to retire, they had a better economy. That's my understanding of the zeitgeist. What did I miss?

Seems like we're talking about a delicate bunch here. When a child grazes its knee and balls it's eyes out, we all know it doesn't really hurt that much and it's more about the comfort (attention) they feel they need to cover the mistake that was made.

Maybe some of us never move on from balling our eyes up over grazes?

Maybe HN could have a Reject Club for everyone who's tried and failed to land a job at a FAANG company. That's probably a decent size group.

Reminds me of 100 days of rejection - https://www.rejectiontherapy.com/100-days-of-rejection-thera...

Or rejectionathon: https://www.rejectionathon.com/

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