We are all losers. None of us makes it through this journey called life without failing at least a few times, whether that failure comes in athletics, politics, school or relationships. Theres plenty of literature supporting the idea that losing is important to character development, so why is the term pejorative? Why does our president dismiss his rivals as losers, as if that is the worst thing anyone can be? Why instead arent we embracing the term and wearing it with pride?

Google Ngrams, which is an online search engine that allows you to chart how often a word or phrase appears in printed texts within Googles text corpora, shows that the word loser began trending upward in the 1960s with a steep spike in usage since 2000. At the same time Americans have become increasingly infatuated with winners, while losers are cultural pariahs.

Molly Absolon

But the problem with our fixation on winning is that for every winner there is a loser, and those losers may be the winner the next time. Loss does not indicate an inherent character flaw. It just shows that at a given moment, under a particular set of circumstances, someone came up short. There are plenty of famous examples of this: Michael Jordon, JK Rowling, Steve Jobs, and the list goes on. Athletes repeatedly fail before succeeding. The tech world talks about failing up, where someones accumulation of bad ideas eventually results in a good one. Losing is important. It teaches us a lot, yet we disparage the idea, looking down on losers until they become winners.

Some psychologists argue competition is a genetic component of human behavior. If you buy into this viewpoint, you believe that from the time we are born we are fighting for attention and survival at the expense of others. This is the notion of Social Darwinism, a theory that has been distorted from Charles Darwins original concept of natural selection to equate survival with winning and losing, where the winner takes all. Such an interpretation of evolution minimizes the importance of cooperation and dependence in the success of a species, and is believed by many to be incomplete and a distortion of Darwins theory. Yet the idea and the phrase, survival of the fittest remains firmly entrenched in our lexicon and is often used to excuse or explain human behavior.

But you can find equally loud voices arguing the opposite. These people believe competition is a learned behavior, and its importance varies according to societal norms. For example, anthropologist Margaret Meads research into the Zuni people of Arizona found that they valued cooperation far more than competition. As an example, she cited an annual footrace in which everyone in the community participated, and the winner was not recorded, beyond making note that if one person won too many years in a row, he or she was banned from the race in the future. Winning, it seems, was not the point.

Based on findings such as these, Mead concluded that competitiveness is a culturally created aspect of human behavior, and its prevalence in a particular society depends on how much that society values it. It should come as no surprise, therefore, to learn that Americans are known throughout the world for our obsession with winning. We idealize the rugged individual who is willing to fight for principles. We worship successful athletes as heroes, and disparage the unsuccessful as, well, losers, ignoring the fact that in denouncing losers we are not only condemning ourselves and everyone who has ever failed at an endeavor, we are also moving toward a world where people are reluctant to take chances because they are afraid of the ignomy of defeat.

When my daughter was a child she played soccer alongside practically every other 6-year-old in town. She wasnt particularly good, nor did she enjoy the sport. We made her stick it out because we thought it would teach her something about commitment and perseverance. At the end of the season all the kids got participation trophies. I was surprised by this. I dont recall participation trophies from my youth. My most unearned reward as a kid was a blue-ribbon for the 6-and-under 25-yard backstroke, in which I won only because no one else was in the race. In the decades between my childhood and my daughters, people seem to have become worried about kids feeling badly about themselves if they lost or werent good at an activity, and so participation trophies became the norm. That trend became so prevalent in the United States and Canada that trophy and award sales totaled an estimated $3 billion in 2013.

We are now experiencing the backlash of that movement. Today most people agree that nonstop recognition and rewarding someone with a trophy for something as insignificant as showing up for practice does not inspire kids to succeed. It doesnt even inspire them to try hard. Why bother, they might say, if Im going to get a trophy regardless of my effort? Some people go so far as to say the generation of kids who received participation trophies is a generation of underachievers. Kids who never learned how to fail and, in the process, also never learned how to win. I think this is probably overstating the effect of those trophies. Even at 6, my daughter knew hers wasnt worth much, and it was quickly relegated to the trash can. But I do think Americans are uncomfortable losing, despite the fact that having winners (which we love) inevitably means someone had to lose.

I thought about this idea when I was a wannabe mountaineer in the 1990s. I went with some friends to climb Mount Logan, the highest peak in Canada. We waited a week at an airstrip in Kluane National Park for the weather to clear so we could fly in, moved up the mountain for a few days, and then, at around 15,000 feet, were hit by a storm. For the next week we sat in our tents playing cribbage, reading, staring at the ripstop nylon squares in the tent over our heads, shoveling snow, listening to the wind roaring outside, sleeping and eating. When the weather finally broke we turned around and went home. I felt like a total failure. Our inability to summit seemed to define our trip and our skill, and we came up short.

I remember thinking people should actually applaud mountaineers who turn around. I remember wishing we were better at recognizing individuals who fail to summit, medal or win a title, because they put in as much effort and work as those who succeed. I truly believed, and still believe, that we need to be better at this, and yet, inevitably, when I have friends who return from a mountaineering trip the first question out of my mouth is, Did you summit? Ditto when someone runs a race or plays a game. Like most Americans, my interest always homes in on someones success or failure.

Id love to change our cultural norms so that cooperation and interdependence is valued as highly as winning. Id love to see Americans embrace the idea that losing is a temporary setback that teaches us skills we need to succeed on the next go round. I think, philosophically, most of us agree with this idea. The problem is that culturally we still consider losers losers.

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Mountainside: What does it mean to be a loser? - Jackson Hole News&Guide