Obsessed With Being a Failure |
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Perfectionists deeply fear failing and what it implies about themselves.
Our misperceptions about ourselves and the world contribute to obsessive terror.
We may not completely evade failure, but we can defang it.
The thing that pains me the most about patients is the thing that pains me the most about myself. I hate how much failure means to us. Arguably, perfectionists fear failure more than anything else, even rejection, which is just an example of it. The questions “Am I good? Am I smart? Am I successful? Am I attractive?” can be combined and framed as “Did I win at life?” or, better, “Am I not a loser?” The hook of social media is based on the insight that many have a chronic need to compare their lives to those of others to reassure themselves they aren’t losers. Social media feeds off of their fears.
But why are we so afraid of failure? Why is it that this emotional state feels akin to the awareness of your imminent death? And why is ambition often less about success and more about relief — the relief of not feeling like a failure? For perfectionists, who are prone to black-and-white thinking, success implies the belief in arrival, or the sense that one has rescued oneself from being a failure. The underlying belief is that there’s a place one can get to wherein they never again have to worry about, essentially, hating themselves — that there's a permanent escape. Social media reinforces the belief, since so many users appear to be permanently happy.
One may easily feel that they've lost this all-important game. Thus, they may spiral. Engaging in black-and-white thinking, they may believe they’re in the "bad" group. Disqualifying the positives of their lives, they may minimize their successes, saying they don’t matter because they didn’t lead to some ultimate victory. The "shoulds" make them recount all of their mistakes and believe that doing something differently would have led to a different life outcome. Catastrophic thinking may cause them to believe that their lives will only get worse, as demotivation and hopelessness cause them to give up altogether. And personalization may become the foundation of the belief that their essence is that of a loser because “winners just win and don’t make excuses.”
Perfectionists fear their own minds. They’re terrified by the inferences surrounding the belief that they're failures. And they tend to believe the thoughts are inextricably linked to failure since they’re certain of their worldview (e.g., of winners-and-losers, an essential self, a point of arrival). To be fair, it isn’t completely their fault. And it’s understandable why consolations tend to feel empty, as if they are stemming from kindness rather than reflecting reality. A recent set of studies (Eskreis-Winkler et al. 2026) examined people’s perceptions of failure. The authors concluded that people consistently underestimated how often failures occur, and this was true across a multitude of domains, including personal ones. The authors called this phenomenon “the failure gap,” arguing that it affects people’s moral judgments — the more aware you are of failure in the world, the less punitive and more helpful you tend to be.
We may argue that the same holds true for people’s self-perceptions — the more aware you are of social injustice and hardship, the less harsh you may be toward yourself. However, the caveat is that you can’t need to feel like the exception. Normalizing can only help if you wish to be normal. This brings us back to the utopian view of life and the sense that special people always arrive in special places. The perfectionist may ask themself: Would I need to be special if such a (utopian) place doesn’t exist? Could I deal with failure, then?
When rational, I’ll tell you that I don’t even want to be successful as much as I want to be better able to cope with failure. (Success is actually as scary as failure when you don't trust it, and the perfectionist usually can't.) I don’t even mean this philosophically, as though this would make me some sage. It’s practical: Chasing success is exhausting, and even more so when you’re obsessed with it. Any obsessive will tell you that, even though they may pretend to love it, at bottom, they hate their obsession — which we should differentiate from a passion, which is less demanding and less restrictive. Obsessions own us because they’re frantic evasions. Sure, pleasure is nice, but it’s the fear (of failure) that controls us.
Perfectionists tend to deeply value freedom, to want to live life according to their visions, and maybe even more so than the average person because, to them, true freedom implies an escape from captors — themselves. In reality, true freedom entails clarity, being unchained from delusions that preclude the ability to make good choices. In treatment, we ask our patients to aspire to being truth seekers because, as the cliche goes: The truth sets you free. Obsessiveness is based on lie after lie, with one false interpretation feeding the others. More likely than not, you and I can both deal with failure. After all, we’ve heavily contributed to its power; we help breathe life into it. We fail to see the failures of others as well as our own successes. We expect too much from ourselves by believing that we could rescue ourselves from life and somehow rise above it. Again, it’s exhausting to wake up each day and have your goal be to "not be a loser."
What Is Perfectionism?
Take our Perfectionism Test
Find a therapist near me
Whatever utopia is, it has to be a freedom from oneself, which I strongly believe can be achieved as long as it isn’t associated with the belief in its permanence. We have to keep doing the work, in large part because the world will continue to try to convince us that we’re the outcasts. And, as important, we have to accept that we’ll always backslide, only to rise up once again. It may not be "rising above," but, maybe it’s better. You tell me what you think.
Eskreis-Winkler, L., Woolley, K., Kim, M., & Polimeni, E. (2026). The failure gap. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 130(3), 485–507. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000468
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