Failure compared to what?

I read about a story this week of teenage girls who ended their lives because they were afraid of failing their exams.

The first reaction most of us have when we hear something like this is to classify it as terrible. Irrational. Disproportionate. They were seventeen. They had their whole lives ahead of them. Exam results are not worth a life.

All of that is true. It is also, if I am being honest, the reaction of someone with the privilege of distance from their own conditioning.

Because the girls were running the same comparison logic we run every day. If I do not pass, I am a failure. If you asked them, failure compared to what, they would probably point to other girls their age doing better, parents whose approval depends on it, a system around them telling them for years that this one moment defines them.

We do the same thing. We have higher tolerance for the consequences because we have lived longer with the script.

When I do not get the job, I am a failure. When the company does not raise the round, I am a failure. When the launch flops, when the partner leaves, when the agency loses the client, when the role does not get extended, when the founder I admire scales past me, when the announcement on LinkedIn belongs to somebody else and not me. All of these are versions of the same engine running on the same logic, asking the same compared-to-what question.

We classify the girls’ response as horrendous because we have perspective on the size of the trigger. We do not classify our own version as horrendous because we are still inside it. We are still running the comparison. We still feel, on a Tuesday afternoon after a difficult call, like something has collapsed in us because something did not go the way we hoped.

I do not need to convince you of this. I only need to point you to the people who already have the perspective we are missing.

Someone who lives in the woods has it. If you sat down with someone who lives quietly in nature and told them about your latest career disappointment, the missed promotion, the failed pitch, the negative feedback, they would look at you the way you look at the girls. With genuine puzzlement about why this is the load you have agreed to carry.

Someone who survived something life-threatening has it. Someone who had cancer. Someone who lost a child, a partner, a parent. If you sat in front of any of them and explained your shame about not being further along than you are at your age, they would struggle to follow you. They would look at you like you are speaking a different language. Because they are looking at the same data from outside the comparison system, and from outside the comparison system the comparison becomes invisible.

The comparison only exists because we agree to keep running it.

I do not want to turn this piece into a conspiracy theory, but I do want us to start asking who benefits from a society where everyone is run by shame. Whose interest is served when you spend your evenings feeling not enough. Where is your energy really going when you compare yourself for the fifth time today against someone you have never met. There are answers and they are not subtle, and they are not what this post is about.

What this post is about is naming the thing.

We are living inside a comparison system taking our energy, our attention, our motivation, our sleep, our relationships, our health. It is depleting us toward goals we did not choose and reframing the depletion as ambition. The girls and us are on the same line. They felt the consequences acutely, in one moment, in one decision. We feel them slowly, over years, as a fatigue we struggle to name and a shame we keep trying to outrun.

This is a big conversation. Bigger than one post. Bigger than a therapist’s practice. It involves the platforms, the schools, the parents, the cultures, the markets, the entire architecture of how worth gets measured in our lives.

I want to start it anyway because the alternative is to keep running the same script, classify other people’s worst moments as irrational, and quietly accept our own version of the same logic as normal.

We have agreed for so long to live inside this system that we have stopped seeing it. The first work is to start seeing it again.