It is hard to win without failures. The indoctrination of “useful idiots” started with participation trophies for kids instead of having medals for winners.
You nailed it Barry: indoctrination. It is unforgivable to raise kids and ensure they never learn how good it feels to claw their way back onto their feet in a nurturing and health environment.
You have fully embraced the dialectic of the Apollonian and the Dionysian archetypes here, Sam. What a beautiful wrestling match! 👏
My intellectual challenge, specially for you, is to finally come up with a word to replace FAILURE in all our essays about living the hero’s journey. It is a dirty little weasel word that keeps pushing us in the wrong direction in our thinking and judgments. Ready, set, go! 🚀
I bought Campbells book when you brought it up weeks ago and it’s sitting on my stack, but I’m not following your thread here. Are you saying he has a more productive way of articulating what I call failure?
Sam, in a culture that not only accepts mediocrity and hands out medals for participation we can only expect the “no fail mission” mindset. Winning on Wall Street is cheating the crap out of the smeals coming to your casino everyday. Not pushing mental and physical boundaries. Marine and SEAL selection and training break the “just show up and be rewarded” mode. A classic example of no fail is the parent who sees a rowing race or just crews training and puts their child in the sport. Binky will love this! It’s like watching swans gracefully ply the waters of our pond out back. Three weeks in Binky is no longer Binky rather Braxton the conqueror, palms blistered and scabbed over constantly tired and beat up and meeting every challenge of an unforgiving sport with a smile…feed me more pain! Seems mommy and daddy marshmallow forgot that underneath the swan were webbed feet paddling like mad. Braxton now lives for chaos and completion he or she is addicted. You know in real life and time that it all goes to shit as soon as you cross the line of departure. I only know from training, but it’s the same chaos especially at night, we did not have NVG’s and trained a lot at night! (Hmmm and phucked it up plenty I might add…) But we need chaos and fear and tired to exhaustion to live. The rest are just sleep walking through life. We should be screaming Go for it! Well the hell with the rest go for it everyday. At age 70 I smile at death at least once a day and say come and get me asshole….well sooner or later he will but in the meantime there is the challenge to push the edges of the envelope…screw confort but hey enjoy it when you have it! Great post! I am reinvigorated for the day’s operations of going out to shovel wet falling snow turning to ice over night…..!!!!
There is something undeniably alive in what you’re describing: the sharpening that comes from voluntary exposure to difficulty. But I keep returning to another layer beneath it: attention.
Chaos expands capacity only if the interior remains coherent. Without disciplined attention, chaos does not awaken... it fragments. It produces noise rather than aliveness.
Perhaps the real training is not merely to rig for pain, but to cultivate the kind of perception that can metabolise intensity without dissolving into it. Otherwise the pro-failure posture risks becoming just another aesthetic of extremity.
Intensity alone is not transformation. Integration is. What do you think?
Excellent thought. My sense is you’re describing to inherent aspects of “rig for pain”. It is not a contradiction but rather a duality. When we used the expression it was not merely “lose yourself in a berserk fury”. It was actually “bring every neuron and cell into alignment for the accomplishment of this mission.” It was fully integrated. Does this address your point?
I think it does. If ‘rig for pain’ already implies alignment, then we’re closer than it first appeared. Perhaps the risk isn’t the principle itself but how easily it’s imitated without that internal coherence. The aesthetic of extremity can look like integration from the outside, while inside it’s fragmentation. The difference is invisible unless one has cultivated that alignment.
'Rig for pain' I love it. Just finished reading 'La Nostalgie du front' thanks for mentioning it. Chardin captured what a lot of us feel better than anyone I've read.
It is hard to win without failures. The indoctrination of “useful idiots” started with participation trophies for kids instead of having medals for winners.
You nailed it Barry: indoctrination. It is unforgivable to raise kids and ensure they never learn how good it feels to claw their way back onto their feet in a nurturing and health environment.
Living inside the bubble is safe. But a better life might be right outside the bubble, never to be experienced.
How can you know what is good, if you have never experienced bad?
Failure is the best teacher.
Yes—life is a spectrum. To only know one end is to never really live. I’m here for this.
I'll go you one better. Life is spatial, three dimensions. We are not on a simple line that allows movement only to the right or left.
Agreed—it could be a tesseract depending on which attributes we’re examining. We’re beautiful complex. And the more complex the more interesting.
You have fully embraced the dialectic of the Apollonian and the Dionysian archetypes here, Sam. What a beautiful wrestling match! 👏
My intellectual challenge, specially for you, is to finally come up with a word to replace FAILURE in all our essays about living the hero’s journey. It is a dirty little weasel word that keeps pushing us in the wrong direction in our thinking and judgments. Ready, set, go! 🚀
I bought Campbells book when you brought it up weeks ago and it’s sitting on my stack, but I’m not following your thread here. Are you saying he has a more productive way of articulating what I call failure?
Murphy and his law a constant operational reality.
An evil best friend…
Sam, in a culture that not only accepts mediocrity and hands out medals for participation we can only expect the “no fail mission” mindset. Winning on Wall Street is cheating the crap out of the smeals coming to your casino everyday. Not pushing mental and physical boundaries. Marine and SEAL selection and training break the “just show up and be rewarded” mode. A classic example of no fail is the parent who sees a rowing race or just crews training and puts their child in the sport. Binky will love this! It’s like watching swans gracefully ply the waters of our pond out back. Three weeks in Binky is no longer Binky rather Braxton the conqueror, palms blistered and scabbed over constantly tired and beat up and meeting every challenge of an unforgiving sport with a smile…feed me more pain! Seems mommy and daddy marshmallow forgot that underneath the swan were webbed feet paddling like mad. Braxton now lives for chaos and completion he or she is addicted. You know in real life and time that it all goes to shit as soon as you cross the line of departure. I only know from training, but it’s the same chaos especially at night, we did not have NVG’s and trained a lot at night! (Hmmm and phucked it up plenty I might add…) But we need chaos and fear and tired to exhaustion to live. The rest are just sleep walking through life. We should be screaming Go for it! Well the hell with the rest go for it everyday. At age 70 I smile at death at least once a day and say come and get me asshole….well sooner or later he will but in the meantime there is the challenge to push the edges of the envelope…screw confort but hey enjoy it when you have it! Great post! I am reinvigorated for the day’s operations of going out to shovel wet falling snow turning to ice over night…..!!!!
This is probably the most motivating comment I have yet to receive on substack. Keep smiling, Charles—and thank you for motivating the hell out of me.
Dumb Marine Corps infantry officers like blond squirrels eventually find a nut!! Keep your fins by your side Frogman!!!
Blind squirrels…though we could get into the blonde jokes and that might be inspiring…or not!
There is something undeniably alive in what you’re describing: the sharpening that comes from voluntary exposure to difficulty. But I keep returning to another layer beneath it: attention.
Chaos expands capacity only if the interior remains coherent. Without disciplined attention, chaos does not awaken... it fragments. It produces noise rather than aliveness.
Perhaps the real training is not merely to rig for pain, but to cultivate the kind of perception that can metabolise intensity without dissolving into it. Otherwise the pro-failure posture risks becoming just another aesthetic of extremity.
Intensity alone is not transformation. Integration is. What do you think?
Excellent thought. My sense is you’re describing to inherent aspects of “rig for pain”. It is not a contradiction but rather a duality. When we used the expression it was not merely “lose yourself in a berserk fury”. It was actually “bring every neuron and cell into alignment for the accomplishment of this mission.” It was fully integrated. Does this address your point?
I think it does. If ‘rig for pain’ already implies alignment, then we’re closer than it first appeared. Perhaps the risk isn’t the principle itself but how easily it’s imitated without that internal coherence. The aesthetic of extremity can look like integration from the outside, while inside it’s fragmentation. The difference is invisible unless one has cultivated that alignment.
Yes the imitation is key. It is astounding how often noble courses of action can be corrupted, innocently or even maliciously.
'Rig for pain' I love it. Just finished reading 'La Nostalgie du front' thanks for mentioning it. Chardin captured what a lot of us feel better than anyone I've read.