Why understanding your failures requires more than remembering them
One of the many privileges of old age is that it allows you to reflect carefully on the mistakes you have made in your life. That sounds more troubled than it really is, or perhaps my view of my past, and of society as a whole, is somewhat unconventional.
I find human failure far more interesting than success. Success tends to grow out of effort, a bit of luck, perseverance, and favorable circumstances. That is not to say I underestimate the existence of large-scale collective failure. At first glance, those may be more dramatic, but to me they belong more to the realm of history, and as a typical individualist I am naturally more interested in my own small and large personal failures.
I will never sing, like Edith Piaf, that I regret nothing, nor will I look back on my life with the quiet satisfaction of Frank Sinatra and conclude with pride that I did it all my way.
I prefer to take stock of the things I have done wrong in my life. Not the personal misjudgments where I alone suffered the consequences, but especially the failures that affected other people in my life. I use the word “failures” here quite deliberately as a euphemism.
To look critically at your former self is a bit like swimming against the current, because the human brain does something peculiar with memory. It softens what is too heavy, it adjusts what needs adjusting, all in order to allow a person to keep living without sinking into prolonged depression or psychosis.
In that sense, the brain takes good care of us. People often remember poorly, or not at all, the exact moment they were thrown through the air after being hit by a car while cycling, yet they recall the surrounding circumstances with remarkable clarity.
So if you truly want to understand what you have done wrong, you almost have to work like a forensic scientist, gathering as many facts as possible. Only then does the course of your failures begin to emerge with some clarity.
Unintentionally, I may now be sketching the image of a somber man staring ahead with an excess of unpleasant conclusions, but the opposite is true. In the autumn of your life, to invoke Sinatra once more, the insights you manage to extract from those filtering brains can allow you to live a very productive life, without falling into the same mistakes again, mistakes that those same self-protective brains are always inclined to conceal.