The Antidote (19 page)

‘Incremental theory' people are different. Because they think of abilities as emerging through tackling challenges, the experience
of failure has a completely different meaning for them: it's evidence that they are stretching themselves to their current limit. If they weren't, they wouldn't fail. The relevant analogy here is with weight training; muscles grow by being pushed to the limits of their current capacity, where fibres tear and reheal. Among weightlifters, ‘training to failure' isn't an admission of defeat – it's a strategy.

Happily, Dweck's studies indicate that we are not saddled for life with one mindset rather than another. A little confusingly, the ‘fixed' mindset is not itself fixed, but can be shifted towards the ‘incremental' end of the continuum. Some people manage to alter their outlook simply by being introduced to the ‘fixed' versus ‘incremental' distinction. Alternatively, it's worth trying to recall it when failure strikes: next time you flunk an exam, or mishandle a social situation, consider that it is only happening because you're pushing at the limits of your present abilities – and therefore, over the long run, improving them. Should you wish to encourage an incremental outlook rather than a fixed one in your children, Dweck advises, take care to praise them for their effort rather than for their intelligence. Focusing on the latter is likely to exacerbate a fixed mindset, making them more reluctant to risk encountering failure in the future. The incremental mindset is the one most likely to lead to success – but a more profound point is that possessing an incremental outlook is a happier way to be, even if it
never
results in any particularly outstanding success. It allows you to abandon the stressful and tiring struggle of perfectionism. It's a win—win proposition, for which the only precondition is a heartfelt willingness to lose.

Interestingly, we may once have been much more willing to think about failure in this way. Prior to the nineteenth century, the historian Scott Sandage has argued, it was rare to hear the
word ‘failure' applied to an individual. Certain ventures, such as an attempt to run for office, or to start a company, might prove to be failures – but the individual behind such an undertaking would be described as having ‘made a failure', not as
being
one. To have made a failure could be depressing, no doubt, and even sometimes catastrophic. But it was not an across-the-board condemnation of an entire human life.

To research his fascinating book
Born Losers,
Sandage had to find creative ways around the survivor bias, which ensures that it is usually only tales of success that find their way into historical archives. Cleverly, he had the idea of using begging letters sent to the oil magnate John D. Rockefeller in the late 1800s. Poring over these and other sources solidified Sandage's hunch that the idea that a
person
could be ‘a failure' had sprung directly from the growth of entrepreneurial capitalism over this period. One crucial development, he argues, was the emergence of credit rating agencies, whose role was to sit in judgment upon individuals seeking loans from banks, helping the banks determine the risk they would be taking by making the loan. In a society increasingly dominated by business, a bad credit rating could all too easily come to be seen as a verdict condemning a whole person – and it is from the language of credit rating, Sandage notes, that we take several modern idioms for describing someone's moral worth, such as ‘good-for-nothing' and ‘first-rate'. Failure, he writes, became transformed from a bump in the road of life to the place at which ‘the story stops'. From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, failure started to be thought of ‘not merely [as] a cataclysm that adds to the plot of your life, but [as] something that stops your life cold, because you lose a sense of your future'.

Failure, in short, came to be seen as a kind of death. The message of the most radical proponents of the embrace of
failure, like Natalie Goldberg, is that it is the exact opposite: the route to a far more vivid, raw, and acutely experienced way of being alive.

Most of the conventionally successful people who champion the benefits of embracing failure are making a much less radical claim than Goldberg's; they are talking about learning to tolerate failure only as a means to their eventual success. A rare exception is J.K. Rowling, the stratospherically successful author of the
Harry Potter
novels, who in 2008 gave a now-famous graduation speech at Harvard University on the subject of failure. Of course, it is impossible to know for sure how Rowling would feel about failure if it hadn't been followed, in her case, by spectacular success. But she conveyed the distinct impression that she would have felt the same about it even if she had remained obscure, poor, and creatively unfulfilled. Her words chime with many of the insights of the Stoics, the Buddhists, and others into the benefits of negativity, and they are worth quoting at length:

I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew. Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea there was going to be what the press has since represented as a fairytale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended … so why do I talk about the benefits of failure?
Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me … I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive. [Failure] gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations … Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

If I had my life over I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death … without an everpresent sense of death, life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.

– Inspector Mortimer in Muriel Spark's
Memento Mori

A
T ONE POINT DURING
the course of the 200,000-line Indian spiritual epic, the
Mahabharata,
the warrior-prince Yudhisthira is being cross-questioned about the meaning of existence by a nature spirit on the banks of a lake, which is the sort of thing that happens in the
Mahabharata
all the time. ‘What is the most wondrous thing in the world?', the spirit wants to know. Yudhisthira's reply has become one of the poem's best-known lines: ‘The most wondrous thing in the world is that although, every day, innumerable creatures go to the abode of Death, still man thinks that he is immortal.'

Wondrous is a good way of putting it. Again and again, we have seen how merely not wanting to think certain thoughts, or to feel
certain emotions, isn't sufficient to eliminate them. That's why nobody ever wins Daniel Wegner's ‘white bear challenge', why selfhelp affirmations often make people feel worse, and why confronting worst-case scenarios is almost always preferable to trying to pretend they couldn't happen. But mortality seems a baffling exception to this rule. Death is everywhere, unavoidable, and uniquely terrifying. Yet as long as it's not impinging on us immediately – through recent bereavement, or a life-threatening illness, or a narrowly survived accident – many of us manage to avoid all thoughts of our own mortality for months, even years, at a time. The more you reflect on this, the stranger it seems. We are perfectly capable of feeling acute self-pity about more minor predicaments, at home or at work, on a daily basis. Yet the biggest predicament of all goes by, for the most part, not consciously worried about. ‘At bottom,' wrote Freud – sweepingly, as usual, but in this case persuasively – ‘no one believes in his own death.'

This apparent nonchalance in the face of mortality looks stranger still in light of the fact that we
do
talk about death, all the time, yet somehow without ever really talking about it. Who reads those magazine features listing ‘a hundred things to do before you die' – places to travel, foods to eat, albums to hear – and pays any real attention to the ‘before you die' part? If you did, your reaction might well be a cry of existential despair: ‘Why bother, if I'm just going to die in the end anyway?' (And existential despair, needless to say, is not the response a magazine editor usually wishes to evoke among readers.) We're captivated by fictional tales of murder, but the ‘murder' in a murder mystery rarely has much to do with the realities of death. Even real deaths in news reports can trigger horror, sympathy, or outrage without once prompting the viewer to reflect that the same basic fate, in a few decades at most, awaits him too. The idea of choosing to
think about our own mortality, in a personal sense, as a matter of daily conversation, strikes us as hilarious – the joke on which, for example, much of the humour in Woody Allen's 1975 movie
Love and Death
rests:

BORIS: Nothingness. Non-existence. Black emptiness.

SONJA: What did you say?

BORIS: Oh, I was just planning my future.

One of the most persuasive explanations of this psychological puzzle remains the one put forward in 1973 by Ernest Becker, in his magnum opus
The Denial of Death.
(Another death-fixated Woody Allen character, Alvy Singer, uses a copy to woo the titular heroine of
Annie Hall.)
Becker was born in Massachusetts in 1924; as a drafted soldier he encountered the worst realities of death while still a young man, helping to liberate a Nazi concentration camp by the time he had turned twenty-one. The lack of serious thought we give to mortality, for Becker, is no accident or oversight: it is precisely
because
death is so terrifying and significant, he argues, that we don't think about it. ‘The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else,' his book begins. But the consequence is that we dedicate our lives to suppressing that fear, erecting vast psychological fortifications so that we can avoid confronting it. Indeed, an enormous proportion of all human activity, in Becker's view, is ‘designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man'.

We are able to sustain this denial, he explains, because we possess both a physical self and a symbolic one. And while it is inevitable that the physical self will perish, the symbolic self – the one that exists in our minds – is quite capable of convincing itself that it
is immortal. The evidence of this is all around us; in fact, it's so ubiquitous that you might miss it. In Becker's view, all religions, all political movements and national identities, all business ventures, all charitable activity and all artistic pursuits are nothing but ‘immortality projects', desperate efforts to break free of death's gravitational pull. We long to think of ourselves not as mortal humans but as immortal ‘heroes'. Society itself is essentially a ‘codified hero system' – a structure of customs, traditions and laws that we have designed to help us feel part of something bigger, and longer-lasting, than a mere human life. Thanks to our symbol-making capacities, he writes, ‘The single organism can expand into dimensions of worlds and times without moving a physical limb; it can take eternity into itself, even as it gaspingly dies.' From this perspective, it isn't only conventionally religious people who depend on the notion of an afterlife. All normally adjusted people, religious or not, unconsciously do so – and ‘every society is thus a “religion”, whether it thinks so or not'. For Becker, mental illness is a malfunctioning of the internal death-denial machinery. Depressed people are depressed because they try but repeatedly fail to shield themselves, as others manage to do, from the truth that they are not, in reality, cosmically significant heroes – and that pretty soon they're going to die.

Immortality projects may be the cause of plenty of good things – great architecture, great literature, great acts of philanthropy, great civilisations – but in Becker's view they are simultaneously the cause of the worst things, too. Our urge to think of ourselves as heroes doesn't discriminate: it helps explain why we compete in sports or politics or commerce, but also why we fight wars. War represents the ultimate clashing of rival immortality projects: if my sense of immortality relies on my nation's triumph, and yours upon yours, we'll fight longer and harder than if we were
seeking only territory or power. ‘Making a killing in business or in the battlefield', writes the philosopher Sam Keen, paraphrasing Becker, ‘frequently has less to do with economic need or political reality than with the need for assuring ourselves that we have achieved something of lasting worth … [Human conflicts] are life-and-death struggles – my gods against your gods, my immortality project against your immortality project.' In other words, we will fight so hard to preserve our symbolic immortality that we will sacrifice our physical lives. In order to deny death, we will die. Even worse, we will deny that this is what we are doing, until the point at which we can deny it no longer. ‘One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war', Becker observes, bleakly, ‘is that deep down, each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die. Each protects himself in this fantasy until the shock that he is bleeding.'

If Becker is right, the ‘wondrous' fact that we behave as if we're immortal isn't so wondrous after all. You don't
fail
to think about your mortality. Rather, your life is one relentless attempt to avoid doing so – a struggle so elemental that, unlike in the case of the ‘white bear challenge', for much of the time you succeed.

A few years after
The Denial of Death
became a bestseller, several experimentally minded psychologists realised that Becker's speculations (and, powerful as they were, they were just speculations) could easily be subjected to a more scientific test. If Becker is correct that we spend our lives fiercely but subconsciously trying to evade thoughts of our own death, it ought to follow that people who are explicitly
reminded
of their mortality – who are, in the language of psychology experiments, ‘primed' to think about it – would instinctively fight back, by clinging ever harder to their death-denying beliefs and behaviours. This is the hunch underlying the field known evocatively as ‘terror management theory', which over
the last two decades has generated numerous persuasive examples of just how deeply the denial of death affects us.

One typical set of terror management experiments, at Rutgers University in New Jersey, in 2003, unfolded as follows. First, the participants were fed a banal cover story about why they had been invited to take part – the study, they were informed, concerned ‘the relationship between personality attributes and opinions about social issues'. Mortality wasn't mentioned. Then they were asked to fill out some lengthy and largely mundane questionnaires, which were identical for each participant, except when it came to two specific questions. For one set of respondents, those questions were about something mundane, too: their television-watching habits. For the others – described as the ‘mortality salience' group – the questions focused on death. One was: ‘Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you.' The other question demanded that respondents ‘jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die, and once you are physically dead.'

Then came a second exercise, which was the study's real point. Participants were asked to read a short essay that expressed strong support for the foreign policies of George Bush, then to decide how far they agreed with it. ‘Personally,' read the essay, ‘I endorse the actions of President Bush and the members of his administration who have taken bold action in Iraq. I appreciate our President's wisdom regarding the need to remove Saddam Hussein from power … We need to stand behind our President and not be distracted by citizens who are less than patriotic.'

Again and again, in terror management experiments, people who have been shifted into this condition of ‘mortality salience' – prompted to think about death – demonstrate markedly different attitudes from those who haven't. Their responses to
questions lend weight to the hypothesis that they are grasping hold of their immortality projects much more firmly than usual, in reaction against being reminded that they will die. Christians show more negativity towards Jews. Moralistic people become more moralistic. Where money is involved, people become less willing to share or to trust, and more eager to hoard whatever wealth they can. And at Rutgers in 2003, when asked how far they shared the views of the essay about President Bush, people in a state of ‘mortality salience' were significantly more willing to endorse its author's fighting talk. Other studies have shown a similar preference, in conditions of mortality salience, for authoritarian personalities over ‘relationship-oriented' ones. It seems clear that Bush benefited greatly from mortality salience effects in the real world as well. The terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 would have functioned like an extreme version of the death questions on a terror-management questionnaire, startling anyone who heard the news into the realisation that they, too, could go into the office one ordinary morning and die. ‘It is [fear] that makes people so willing to follow brash, strong-looking demagogues with tight jaws and loud voices,' wrote Becker – leaders ‘who seem most capable of cleansing the world of the vague, the weak, the uncertain, the evil. Ah, to give oneself over to their direction – what calm, what relief.'

Mortality salience makes itself felt in numerous other, sometimes unexpected ways. Experimental subjects who have been prompted to think about death demonstrate more intense reactions of disgust to discussions of human bodily waste. They agree more strongly with statements such as ‘If I see someone vomit, it makes me sick to my stomach.' They are more likely to rank certain hypothetical scenarios as ‘very disgusting', for example seeing maggots on a piece of meat. This response, researchers
argue, shows that participants are struggling to buffer themselves against confronting reminders of their ‘creatureliness' – of the fact that, like other animals, they are physically mortal. ‘Disgust', one such paper states, enables ‘humans to elevate themselves above other animals and thereby defend against death'. (This reaction to mortality, following Becker's logic, may also help explain some cultures' taboos against menstruating women, and why defecation and urination are generally done in private.) People in a condition of mortality salience, it transpires, are also more likely to be sympathetic to the theory of ‘intelligent design', perhaps for similar reasons: if you can convince yourself that life didn't emerge meaninglessly from the primordial swamp, it's easier to feel that it won't end in meaningless extinction, either.

In view of all this, the argument that it could be
beneficial
to live with more daily consciousness of one's mortality might sound impractical at best. For one thing, Becker's argument seems to suggest that the denial of death is far too deep-rooted for us ever to hope to unseat it. Besides, if it is the motivation for all sorts of extraordinary human achievements, would you really even want to do so? Yet since the time of the ancient Greeks, certain radical thinkers have taken the position that a life suffused with an awareness of one's own mortality – as a matter of everyday habit, not just when direct encounters with death force our hand – might be a far richer kind of existence. It is also surely a more authentic one. Death
is
a fact of life, however hard we might try to deny it. In fact, the ‘cult of optimism', with its focus on positivity at all costs, can itself be seen as a kind of ‘immortality project' – one that promises a future vision of happiness and success so powerful and all-encompassing that it might somehow transcend death. Positive thinkers, it's true, do pay lip-service to mortality awareness, with their homilies about ‘living each day
as if it were your last'. But this is usually delivered as mere motivational advice, as a spur to get moving, to start realising your greatest ambitions. And if those ambitions are themselves simply more immortality projects, we have not really come any closer to living with an awareness of death.