In Chapter 2 we looked at how individuals may fail across the lifespan. Here the emphasis is on how fallibility, flaws and failings can add up to an experience or perception of enormous, almost embodied failure: being a failure. Three features of the phrase “being a failure” should readily jump out at us. The first is that we undeniably have such a self-concept in our culture, as in the sad statement “I am a complete failure”, which some people make, often with variable accompanying adjectives such as total, abject or miserable. The second is that we may readily accept responsibility for personal failure even when the obvious elements of biological and social failure are quite outside our making or control. The third is that it seems unlikely, if not impossible, for anyone actually to be a (total) failure, in a similar way to being itself not being non-being. Any of us may fail at certain things but none us can be a perfect failure.

In his survey of philosophical views on “status anxiety”, Alain de Botton acknowledges: