This focus on the individual is significant. If these motivational quotes spin a salvation narrative, it is one of individual salvation. Philosophers still debate the idea that certain aspects of human existence are progressing toward greater refinement. But none of them think that our individual lives point in an upward trajectory. As a species, we may yet do things in the future that you and I cannot dream of today, but as individuals, the window of self-transcendence closes pretty much when we leave high school. If anything, societal progress tends to evacuate our individual failures of meaning. Think of the last generation of people to die of a disease before it is eliminated. Think of the last woman burned as a witch before people wised up. The bromides about Michael Jordan and J. K. Rowling are premised on the idea that we’re all Michael Jordan and J. K. Rowling.
That wouldn’t have to be the intent of the posters. In 1818, the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel said that “in contemplating history,” which he called “the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed,” a question forces itself upon us: “To what principle, to what final purpose, have these monstrous sacrifices been offered?” Could all the failures and colossal wrecks have been worth it, to serve some overarching purpose? It’s a common, compelling, and often highly controversial idea in the history of philosophy. But it’s very much not the idea behind “fail better.” Even if they didn’t insist that you—yes, you—could one day write “Halo,” the motivational bromides would have to spell out what end our enormous sacrifices serve. That is called utopianism, and for all of tech’s obsession with the future, it is something the industry is uncomfortable with. Because utopianism is political: it spells out what will exist and what won’t exist in the good, true, and just state to come. Tech is fond of the weak utopianism of its bottom line—getting everyone into a self-driving car, say, or getting a human on Mars, or getting you a burrito in under thirty minutes.
If Silicon Valley has domesticated failure, it has done so as part of a self-help ethos. It is interested in the way failure can make a better you, and the language it borrows frames failure as a route to an eventual redemption. The design-thinking process taught by the Stanford d.school has five steps: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. It’s in step four, Prototype, that failure becomes most important: you need to “fail fast” and “iterate quickly.” You’re done with empathy and ideation; it’s now about your own expectations for yourself. The most popular class that teaches this method has very little to do with gadgets or websites. It is called Designing Your Life, and is taught by Dave Evans and Bill Burnett. The class, and the successful 2016 book, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, that Evans and Burnett spun off from it, are premised on the idea that, as Burnett put it in a TEDx Talk, “the most interesting design problem is your life.”
Significantly, d.life, as the class is known, returns design thinking to a sphere that very clearly inspired a lot of its ideas in the first place, but which the field often hid under a lot of jargon. Much of this stuff, it turns out, has been about self-help all along—with particular emphasis on the self part. For all the talk about empathy (which is, after all, the first step of design thinking), the focus is usually on the creative self: in practice, the Empathize step consists of some pretty minimal observation of other people in action and maybe filming them interacting with an object or a space. It could uncharitably be described as an unempathetic person’s idea of empathy.
Sociology has long regarded the self-help phenomenon as responding to a particularly modern, and particularly capitalist, kind of loneliness. From Dale Carnegie’s advice for the lone salesman to Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese? (1998), self-help literature offered to give shape to lives that had lost an earlier sense of orientation and embedding; lives whose coordinates and fixed points once felt objectively valid, but now felt worryingly up for grabs. The more we are detached from communal standards and an in-group whose views validate us, the more we are alone with ourselves and the cold, unflinching gaze of society—and we have to seek validation via what we consume, how we decorate our homes, how we take care of ourselves, and so forth. Self-help is frequently about asserting our autonomy, not by rejecting societal norms or our historical situation but by understanding them better than other individuals in society, and thereby coming out ahead of others in our situation.
But d.life is perhaps less interesting as a self-help project than as a set of discursive tricks used to elide that fact. Like much of self-help, it borrows from pop psychology. More specifically, a lot of its central operations are borrowed from cognitive behavioral therapy. As the historian Lee Vinsel has pointed out, the concept of “reframing” is basically a direct carryover from the idea common in CBT that we need to challenge “negative thought patterns.” We may inhabit a distorted version of the world around us, and our coping mechanisms may turn against us; CBT promises to reframe our relationships and the habits by which we manage those relationships.
At least part of the reason CBT has become so influential is that it gets at some pretty old ideas about human nature. There is a pronounced stoicism to it, but also a very American work
