The Antidote (16 page)

This extraordinary passage, once you grasp the point – and it took me a while – explains in the most complete sense why our efforts to find happiness are so frequently sabotaged by ‘ironic' effects, delivering the exact opposite of what we set out to gain. All positive thinking, all goalsetting and visualising and looking on the bright side, all trying to make things
go our way,
as opposed to some other way, is rooted in an assumption about the separateness of ‘us' and those ‘things'. But on closer inspection this assumption collapses. Trying to flee from insecurity to security, from uncertainty to certainty, is an attempt to find an exit from the very system that makes us who we are in the first place. We can influence the system of which we are a part, certainly. But if we are motivated by this misunderstanding about who we
are, and what security is, we'll always risk going too far, trying too hard, in self-defeating ways. Watts concludes:

The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the ‘I' out of the experience … Sanity, wholeness and integration lie in the realisation that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate ‘I' or mind can be found … [Life] is a dance, and when you are dancing, you are not intent on getting somewhere. The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.

This, then, is the deep truth about insecurity: it is another word for life. That doesn't mean it's not wise to protect yourself, as far as you can, from certain specific dangers. But it does mean that feeling secure and really living life are, in some ultimate sense, opposites. And that you can no more succeed in achieving perfect security than a wave could succeed in leaving the ocean.

You can't turn a sow's ear into a Veal Orloff. But you can do something very good with a sow's ear.

– Julia Child

I
N AN UNREMARKABLE BUSINESS
park near the airport outside the city of Ann Arbor, in Michigan, stands a poignant memorial to humanity's shattered dreams. Not that you'd know it from the outside. From the outside, it looks like a car dealership, because that's what it was until 2001, when a company with the enigmatic name of GfK Custom Research North America moved in. Even when you get inside – which members of the public rarely do – it takes a few moments for your eyes to adjust to what you're seeing. There is no lobby or reception desk, no list of departments, nobody waiting to greet you. Instead, you find yourself in what appears to be a vast and haphazardly organised supermarket. It contains no shoppers, but along every aisle the grey metal shelves are crammed with tens of thousands of packages of food and household products. There is something unusually cacophonous about these displays, and soon enough, you work out the reason.
Unlike in a real supermarket, there is only one of each item; there are no uniform ranks of jars of pasta sauce, boxes of dishwasher detergent, or fizzy-drink cans. The more important point about the products on these shelves, though, is that you won't find them in a real supermarket anyway. They are all failures: products withdrawn from sale after a few weeks or months because almost nobody wanted to buy them. In the product-design business, GfK Custom Research's storehouse of fiascos has acquired the nickname of ‘the museum of failed products'. It is consumer capitalism's graveyard – the shadow side to the relentlessly upbeat, success-focused culture of modern marketing. Or to put it less grandly: it's almost certainly the only place on the planet where you'll find Clairol's ‘A Touch of Yoghurt' shampoo, alongside Gillette's equally unpopular ‘For Oily Hair Only', a few feet from a now-empty bottle of Pepsi AM Breakfast Cola (born 1989; died 1990). The museum is home to discontinued brands of caffeinated beer; to TV dinners branded with the logo of the toothpaste manufacturer Colgate; to self-heating soup cans that had a regrettable tendency to explode in customers' faces; and to packets of breath mints that had to be withdrawn from sale because they looked like the tiny packages of crack cocaine dispensed by America's street dealers. It is where microwaveable scrambled eggs – pre-scrambled and packaged in a cardboard tube, with a pop-up mechanism for easier consumption in the car – go to die.

Laugh too hard at any of these products, though, and the museum's proprietor, an understatedly stylish GfK employee named Carol Sherry, will purse her lips and arch her eyebrows over her Dolce & Gabbana spectacles as if to chide you. And she will be only half-joking. It is Sherry's job to act as chaperone to the product designers and other executives who pay significant sums for the right to inspect GfK's collection of failures, and she
treats the products in her care like disappointing yet still fundamentally lovable children. One bright December morning, giving me a tour of the building, she paused before a cream-coloured bottle of body lotion, and an expression close to sadness flickered across her face. ‘Ah, yes, now, this,' she said fondly. ‘Pulled very abruptly from the market. Unfortunately, it led to an increased risk of fungal infection.'

There is a Japanese term,
mono no aware,
that translates very roughly as ‘the pathos of things'. It captures a kind of poignant melancholy at life's impermanence – that additional beauty imparted to cherry blossoms, or cloud formations, or human features, as a result of their inevitably fleeting time on earth. It is only stretching this concept slightly to suggest that Sherry feels the same way about, for example, the cartons of Morning Banana Juice in her care, or about Fortune Snookies, a short-lived line of fortune cookies for dogs. Every failure, the way she sees it, embodies its own sad story of sincere effort on the part of designers, marketers, salespeople and others. It is never far from her mind that real people had their mortgages, their car payments, and their family holidays riding on the success of A Touch of Yoghurt or Fortune Snookies. Or of Hueblein Wine and Dine Dinners, a line of pre-prepared meals packaged with a half-sized bottle of cooking wine, which customers, understandably, assumed was meant for drinking. (Then they tasted the wine. And then they stopped buying Hueblein Wine and Dine Dinners.)

‘I feel really sorry for the developer on this one,' Sherry said, indicating the breath mints that inadvertently resembled crack. ‘I mean, I've met the guy. Why would he ever have spent any time on the streets, in the drug culture? He did everything right, except go out on the streets to see if his product looked like drugs.' She shook her head. ‘To me, it takes incredible courage to be a product
developer. There are so many ways it could go wrong. These are real people, who get up every morning and sincerely want to do their best, and then, well … things happen.'

The museum of failed products was itself a kind of accident, albeit a happier one. Its creator, a now-retired marketing man named Robert McMath, merely intended to accumulate a ‘reference library' of consumer products, not failures
per se.
Starting in the 1960s, he began purchasing and preserving a sample of every new item he could find. (He usually emptied out any perishable contents, to stop things getting disgusting.) Soon, the collection outgrew his office in upstate New York and he was forced to move into a converted granary to accommodate it. Later, GfK – the initials are derived from the German name of its parent company – bought him out, moving the whole lot to Michigan. What McMath hadn't taken into account, he told me on the phone from his home in California, was the three-word truth that was to prove the making of his career: ‘Most products fail.' According to some estimates, the failure rate is as high as 90 per cent. Simply by collecting new products indiscriminately, McMath had ensured that his hoard would come to consist overwhelmingly of unsuccessful ones. ‘You know, I never really liked the term “museum of failed products”,' he told me. ‘But there it is. It stuck. There wasn't much I could do about it.'

I suspected him of being a little disingenuous about this, since all the evidence suggests that McMath revelled in his reputation as a guru of failure. In the early years, he was a fixture on the lecture circuit, and then on American cable television; David Letterman even interviewed him about what McMath was happy to refer to as his ‘library of losers'. He wrote a marketing manual,
What Were They Thinking?,
devoted largely to poking fun at products such as Revlon's ‘No Sweat' antiperspirant and ‘Look of
Buttermilk', a companion product to Clairol's ‘Touch of Yoghurt'. (As McMath points out, you should never mention sweat when marketing anti-sweat products, because shoppers find it repulsive. It's entirely unclear, meanwhile, what the ‘look of buttermilk' might be, let alone why you might wish your hair to sport it.) But Sherry seemed disapproving of the levity with which her predecessor had approached his work. ‘Originally, yes, the hook with the media was that he was the owner of a museum of failures,' she sighed. ‘But I think that's just a shame. It's human to point fingers and revel in someone else's misery, I guess. But I just feel very attached to everything in here.' She had a point. True, I laughed when I encountered Goff's Low Ash Cat Food, with its proud boast, ‘contains only one point five per cent ash!' (As the journalist Neil Steinberg has noted, this is like marketing a line of hot dogs called ‘Few Mouse Hairs'.) Yet several people presumably invested months of their lives in creating that cat food. I hope they can look back and chuckle about it now. But who knows?

By far the most striking thing about the museum of failed products, though, has to do with the fact that it exists as a viable, profit-making business in the first place. You might have assumed that any consumer product manufacturer worthy of the name would have its own such collection, a carefully stewarded resource to help it avoid repeating errors its rivals had already made. Yet the executives arriving every week at Carol Sherry's door are evidence of how rarely this happens. Product developers are so focused on their next hoped-for success – and so unwilling to invest time or energy in thinking about their industry's past failures – that they only belatedly realise how much they need, and are willing to pay, to access GfK's collection. Most surprising of all is the fact that many of the designers who have found their way to the museum
of failed products, over the years, have come there in order to examine – or, alternatively, have been surprised to discover – products that
their own companies
had created and then abandoned. These firms were apparently so averse to thinking about the unpleasant business of failure that they had neglected even to keep samples of their own disasters.

‘Here's how it usually goes,' said McMath. ‘A product will be developed by a product manager, and it won't work out, and he'll probably just keep a few in his bedroom closet, for sentimental value, but then he'll eventually leave the company.' The product may now no longer exist anywhere, except in the manager's bedroom. Nor, of course, will he bring examples of his failures to his next place of work: why voluntarily associate yourself with misfires? ‘People are inspired by success and achievement, and marketing people are as human as anyone,' said Sherry. ‘You want to be able to tell a good story about your accomplishments.' It is unlikely that many people at his former firm will want to dwell on what went wrong, either. Failure simply isn't a topic on which ambitious people wish to spend much of their time. At best, it's just depressing; at worst, it feels somehow infectious – as if the germs of disaster might infect your next project. Recall the message of Dr Robert H. Schuller, at Get Motivated!, instructing his audience to cut the word ‘impossible' out of their vocabularies and to refuse to contemplate the possibility of failure. The very fact that the consumer products industry needs a museum of failed products indicates that many product designers and marketing executives have done exactly that.

McMath turned a little coy when I asked him to tell me which executives, specifically, had found themselves compelled to visit his collection, tails between legs, to examine their own companies' products, though after some pestering he let it be known that
some of them might have worked for a multinational beginning with ‘P' and ending in ‘rocter & Gamble'. But he did vividly remember one product design team who approached him with a plan to market two companion lines of sex-specific nappies, for boys and girls, with the padding configured differently in each. This turns out to have been an often-attempted, often-abandoned innovation: parents generally don't see the need, while retailers resent having to use up more shelf space in order to avoid running out of either kind. It was with glee that Robert McMath ushered the designers to an aisle in his collection to show them not only that their idea had already been tried – but that it had been their own firm that had tried it.

Failure is everywhere. It's just that most of the time we would rather avoid confronting that fact.

Failure, and our fraught relationship, to it is a theme that has been playing in the background of much of this book so far. It is the thing that the culture of positive thinking strives at all costs to avoid, so it should come as little surprise that it should be so central to an alternative approach to happiness. The Stoic technique of negative visualisation is, precisely, about turning towards the possibility of failure. The critics of goalsetting are effectively proposing a new attitude towards failure, too, since an improvisational, trial-and-error approach necessarily entails being frequently willing to fail. The spiritual ruminations of Eckhart Tolle and Alan Watts, meanwhile, point to an even deeper kind of failure: the ultimate – and ultimately liberating – failure of the ego's efforts to maintain its separation and security.

But it is also worth considering the subject of failure directly, in order to see how the desperate efforts of the ‘cult of optimism'
to avoid it are so often counterproductive, and how we might be better off learning to embrace it. The first reason to turn towards failure is that our efforts not to think about failure leave us with a severely distorted understanding of what it takes to be successful. The second is that an openness to the emotional experience of failure can be a stepping-stone to a much richer kind of happiness than can be achieved by focusing only on success. It has become fashionable, in some circles, to insist upon the importance of ‘embracing failure': no autobiography of a high-profile entrepreneur or politician or inventor is complete without several passages in which the author attributes his or her success to a willingness to fail. (Sir Richard Branson is a repeat offender in this regard.) But truly embracing failure entails a shift in perspective far greater than what most such figures mean when they pay lip-service to the notion. And in any case, heeding only the advice of the successful is a big part of the problem.

Our resistance to thinking about failure is especially curious in light of the fact that failure is so ubiquitous. ‘Failure is the distinguishing feature of corporate life,' writes the economist Paul Ormerod, at the start of his book
Why Most Things Fail,
but in this sense corporate life is merely a microcosm of the whole of life. Evolution itself is driven by failure; we think of it as a matter of survival and adaptation, but it makes equal sense to think of it as a matter of not surviving and not adapting. Or perhaps more sense: of all the species that have ever existed, after all, fewer than 1 per cent of them survive today. The others failed. On an individual level, too, no matter how much success you may experience in life, your eventual story – no offence intended – will be one of failure. Your bodily organs will fail, and you'll die.