Failure

I think I’m slowly starting to come to terms with the fact, that I don’t especially like failure. Now, you might think that that’s true for everyone, and sure to a certain degree that is probably true, but I’m very much noticing that I’m avoiding situations and activities where failure is a possibility, or at least enjoying such things a whole lot less. It just tends to, frustrate me I guess? Instead of becoming a learning opportunity and something I take as a lesson, I just end up all too easily giving up and doing something else.

This has been coming up in several different contexts in recent times, and also partially because I do quite a bit more self-reflection at the moment in general. Most recently I noticed this with Rise to Ruins, a kind of roguelike city-builder I suppose, where while I was enjoying the gameplay just fine and learning how it all works, my villagers started dying of starvation even though there was some food available—not much to be fair, I hadn’t prepared for the season properly, but there was a little food available and they didn’t really need to starve it felt like, and more was being prepared the whole time—and I just kind of ended up stopping playing at that point.

Now, the game bills itself as being hard and having a learning curve and saying that you won’t succeed the first time around, so this experience is something I should’ve expected going into it, but it’s still something that left me feeling like not wanting to play the game anymore and that feeling remains even though several weeks have passed since. My thoughts do wander to the game occasionally to be fair, so maybe I end up trying it again at some point, but we’ll see.

Another example that comes to mind, last summer as I was playing through RPGs I mostly ended up playing them on something like easy, which is a bit out of the ordinary for me since I most often tend to play things on normal or the equivalent. This was partially motivated by me not being such a huge friend of the resource management in the spells system that tends to be present in the type of D&D-inspired RPGs I was playing, but even though that wasn’t really the case in Pillars of Eternity II I still played the game on easy, so I’m not quite sure that was the whole reason. Now, to be fair, for me the more interesting part is the story and the social interactions anyway and the combat I don’t find overly interesting, and it quite simply just felt more relaxing doing it this way around and I’m not advocating that everyone needs to always do things the hardest way possible or that something has to be difficult for it to be enjoyable but these are merely observations of a pattern in recent times.

I stated before, that I don’t really believe failure is something that provides a great deal of joy to most people, even if they do then end up learning from it, and that it is then later the application of that learning and seeing the improvement that provides the joy. But it feels, therein lies the rub for me at the moment, I feel uncomfortable putting myself in situations where I don’t feel safe being able to succeed instantly, and when that doesn’t happen I feel all the more bad about my failure since it was something where I was expecting to succeed and am not able to gleam as much learning as might be possible from it. My problem, as it were, is not with failing itself but the reaction and mindset surrounding it that I have at the moment, and that is something I feel I need to work on.

I worry I might be paralysing myself with fear to a degree, where I find it more difficult to start with things since I fear I might not succeed—or perhaps my difficulties with starting things are mostly unrelated and at some point worth a post of their own.