How Do You Deal with Disappointments?

Failure hurts, but it can lead to good things, writes Tom Hodgkinson
(plus brilliant comments from Idler readers)

I was chatting with a friend who runs a very successful small publishing company. He asked me if I had any books on the go. I replied, “I’ve got a few ideas out there, but doubtless they’ll all come to nothing. Yet more disappointments.”

“Yes. My life is one long catalogue of disappointments,” he said.

And so it is. The project that we think might reach the fabled and mythical “tipping point” never quite happens. And this is true for the celebrated as well as for the obscure. Aldous Huxley was hoping until his death in 1963 for a major film or theatrical success which would give him financial independence. It never happened.

There are examples everywhere you look. I was struck that Bret Easton Ellis, speaking at an event in London earlier this year, said he spent 13 years trying and failing to get scripts made into TV shows before giving up.

The brilliant Oliver Goldsmith was always hoping for a big success, but it eluded him. Worse, he never received the critical appreciation he hoped for, complaining that when he released a new book, “the public make a special point of ignoring it”. Anyone who has attempted any sort of literary production will know what he means.

The other day I met a young TV producer. She said she was planning to quit the business. I asked why. “Too much heartbreak,” she said. “Only one of maybe 100 proposals sees the light of day. That’s a lot of very disappointed people.”

In her interview in the current issue of the Idler, Rachel Weisz told me that for every success like Dead Ringers, she’ll have ten disappointments.

And Samuel Beckett famously looked back on his literary career with regret. “What blunders all the way. Why didn’t I go into Guinness’s as father wished?”

It’s a thought that occasionally pops into the mind of anyone who has embarked on a more or less creative life, I should think. Why didn’t I just get a job at John Lewis or in the civil service?

The only response, I think, is a sort of cheerful Stoicism, and a counting of your blessings, and a giving of thanks for your freedom. As Epictetus put it, “Don’t hope that events will turn out the way you want, welcome events in whichever way they happen: this is the path to peace.” And disappointments, of course, can lead to good things, if treated with patience.

How do you deal with disappointment? Answers on an email (or postcard).

SELECTED COMMENTS

These comments were mailed to us after an earlier version of this piece was sent out as a newsletter. We like to publish a selection and reserve the right to edit them for clarity. Feel free to drop us a line with your thoughts.

Sir: My own view on this rich theme of disappointments is that they are completely inevitable and actually quite useful. There are certain tensions and conflicts we experience as young people that we assume the “future“ will resolve for us somehow, and then we get to the future and realise that isn’t going to happen. So perhaps the point of said tensions and conflict is not to arrive at their resolution but to arrive at acceptance. I’m not saying this is easy by the way. A disappointment always implies some kind of loss. So the much-ridiculed midlife crisis is better described as a time of considering the hollowness at the core of things; being a bit horrified by that, and then adjusting to it. It also requires us to consider that certain things are not going to be solved or resolved or fulfilled, and that is loss too. We typically start losing parents or friends and experiencing bereavement. If we are fortunate, something obliges us to peer at all of this. This can be a turbulent experience, but if we can withstand it, we end up with more parts of us available to engage in the life that we actually have. If we are not fortunate, we find ways to keep buying into certain narratives, and we never have that recalibration, and we continue with a lot of mental energy invested into things that aren’t really substantial and can’t really be fulfilling. Our culture teaches us to value certain things as young people. We get spat out of education and random childhoods into the supermarket of life, with a big trolley and a shopping list, and if we don’t know any better, we can imagine that during this lifespan, the point is a big dash to put as many things on our culture’s shopping list in the trolley as possible. The reward of disappointment is that we are forced to rip up the shopping list and abandon the notion that certain things have to go in that trolley during this lifespan, in order for us to have “succeeded”. There’s my take on it. Hope life is excellent.
Diana de Cabarrus

Sir: Because winning and being disappointed are both experiences, for me both states are a form of winning. Besides, experience, be it positive or negative, is life’s great teacher. It’s a win-win. So pick yourself up and stop being grumpy. For what it’s worth, if an experience is that dramatic, that negative, I retreat to my summer-house with a G&T or two. Then everything is all sweetness and light again.
Ray Howes

Sir: How do I deal with disappointments? Shout, scream, kick the cat – all fairly consoling (for me of course, not the cat). Alternatively I will soak in a very hot bath until the only thing that’s important is that I get out of the bath and lie on my bed with a bloody good book. Or a copy of the Idler – same difference as far as mood-changing magic is concerned.
Patricia Kerr

Sir: Being satisfied with one’s lot doesn’t provide much in the way of drive. Most of the successfully creative people I know are permanently disappointed, both by what they produce, and the response they get. This is what pushes them to produce more, chasing that ever-elusive state of contented fulfilment. I guess it would have been nice for Franz Kafka if he’d been chuffed to bits about Metamorphosis, but then he might not have bothered to write The Trial. I obviously don’t put myself even in the vicinity of these greats, but I do try to get through disappointment by remembering its motivational power. It’s only the constant sense of having failed in some way that got me to do all the interesting things that followed – which perhaps is another way that without disappointment, I would merely be… idle.
Paul Moss

Sir: I think it was Russell Lynes who said “Every journalist has a novel in him – which is an excellent place for it.” At least it avoids disappointment.
Jerry Hibbert

Sir: The ancient Greeks said (or one of them did): “Honours or glory”. But it’s not that simple. Geniuses want glory, yes – but some honours would be nice too. Henry James sold fewer and fewer novels the more wonderful they became. His last three are breathtaking and sold in paltry numbers. He didn’t really care. But Evelyn Waugh was a gas from the word go, tailed off, and was embittered in old age. Proust was celebrated the moment the first volume of his masterpiece appeared, but his apprenticeship was almost a lifetime of false starts. And he had to steel himself to step out of that cork-lined bedroom to the very end. Picasso left his garret quite soon. But he kept changing his style, as well as his women, because he was so profoundly disquieted and experimental. Not only the Romantic geniuses (Beethoven, Michelangelo – yes, Mike was a romantic working in the Classical idiom) pulled their hair out. Borromini committed suicide. Gesualdo was a murderer. Mozart was buried without ceremony, and few mourners, while Verdi and Hugo had colossal funerals. Who was the happiest of the three? Hemingway, in every bookshop in the world, shot himself. Virginia Woolf was a hit and Anna Kavan wasn’t. Virginia drowned herself and Anna injected heroin. And as for Oscar… It is in the nature of genius to be restless and dissatisfied. There never was a complacent genius. Not even Trollope. Genius needs to be allowed to behave badly otherwise the gold is never mined from the depths. The arts are not a branch of the NHS. Please tell Wokist Gatekeepers this. Don’t believe Samuel Beckett by the way. He was trying to be cute. He wouldn’t and couldn’t have lived otherwise. The man who wrote “I can’t go on. I go on.” I thought that when I won the PEN Ackerley Prize, a few more doors might open to me. On the contrary – the remaining doors slammed shut. “Oh my god, now everybody knows he’s a quality operator,” said the book biz, “we better avoid him.” I could go on for ever. It’s a problem I wrestle with daily. Even agents won’t speak to me. Returning to the ancient Greeks. Artists and writers, great or modest, should remind themselves of the Muses, not the marketing departments. It is the Muses who are in charge here. When I return to my work, I know exactly why I do it. I feel thrilled working. And afterwards, going out into life, I feel good, and well-orientated to the world. On Parnassus, you never hear the word “success”.
Duncan Fallowell

Sir: I deal with disappointments with equanimity. What else are we to do?
Kevin Etherington