ABSTRACT
Our lives are full of failures. Some are significant. Some are trivial. Some are reprehensible. Some are laughable. Some are worth responding to. Some aren’t. But, as we said, life is full of these things, so let’s be gentle about them. Failing is a way of acting non-ideally. Instead of “failure,” let’s just talk about behaving in a “non-ideal” way. When the New England Patriots won the Super Bowl in 2015, this was, for the Patriots and their fans, ideal. When the New England Patriots won the Super Bowl in 2015, this was, for the fans of the Cleveland Browns, non-ideal: There can be only one Super Bowl winner and the Browns failed in pursuit of the ideal of winning it. Again.
