According to the best estimates, 99.9 percent of all the species that ever existed on earth have gone extinct. A similar fate awaits the extant ones. A lot has to go right for a new species to establish itself, yet even then most of its members do not partake in the species’s success, for they either die early, fail to reproduce, or get eliminated by enemies, competitors, or nature’s adversities. Given the great quotient of failure in the struggle for life, one could say that every living organism descends from ancestors that beat the odds—that were “winners.” However, in this sense “winning” means little more than the perpetuation of loss. If the measure of success is survival, even the fittest members of a flourishing species are losers in the long run.
In antiquity humans were referred to as “mortals,” which meant that they were destined not only to die but also to suffer loss, misfortune, and disaster. By comparison with the immortal gods, even the loftiest mortals are losers in the long run (as Achilles realizes in Hades). In his book In Praise of Failure, the philosopher and essayist Costica Bradatan reminds us that we flash into existence between “two instantiations of nothingness,” namely the nothingness before we were born and the one after we die. Each one of us, ontologically speaking, is next to nothing. And each one of us, despite our precarious condition, has something to lose. “Myths, religion, spirituality, philosophy, science, works of art and literature”—all, according to Bradatan, seek to make our next-to-nothingness “a little more bearable.”
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/07/at-ease-amid-the-ruins-in-praise-of-...
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