When you play Wordle, you get statistics: how many games you’ve played, the percentage of times you’ve solved the puzzle and most importantly, your longest continuous winning streak. I’d like to get to 100, but so far the best I’ve managed is 51.
It’s only a game and has no material bearing on any other aspect of my life, yet in a magical-thinking way, I still feel things are going a little bit better for me if I’m deep into a winning streak with the hope of improving on my record. Yet in Wordle, as in pretty much everything else, failure is inevitable. If failing regularly makes a person a failure, then I’m a failure. So are you.
That’s not something we like to dwell upon though. Numerous scientific studies have established how failure tends to make us snap into Rationalisation Mode. You’ve no doubt seen it yourself. Fail at something like Wordle and you’ve the comfort of telling yourself it’s just a silly game. But if it’s something more significant, like, say, failing at a job interview, we can tell ourselves that we didn’t really want the job at all. Or go a bit conspiratorial: they’d already made up their mind who they wanted to give it to. I didn’t get it because I was the wrong gender or from the wrong part of the country or because I didn’t have the right contacts.
Often, people will depart from even this flimsy logic and take refuge in meaningless platitudes. My personal favourite: Things happen for a reason. No, they don’t.
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‘When the cinema lights came up, we all hugged, and I wondered why, on this day, the magic worked for me too’
Such is our reluctance to face up to our failures, big or small, that often we don’t give ourselves the opportunity to learn from them. You could go back to the company and ask why you didn’t get the job, but that risks discovering some profound lack in yourself; that no matter how hard you try, you’ll never be good enough.
As you know, but may want to forget about, both the Irish football and rugby teams lost their respective matches last weekend. The former wasn’t so much of a surprise. The latter stung profoundly: because of a well-grounded belief that this team were different. Not just because of their individual and collective abilities, but because of their attitude: somehow they had managed to overcome that Irish mindset where we would reach a certain stage and suddenly start to doubt ourselves; where we would feel that we didn’t deserve to do any better.
That lack of self-confidence has dogged Ireland, not just in sport but in many aspects of our public life ever since the foundation of the State: that the way we run our country isn’t particularly good. We’re too incompetent and venal to get anything right. Go on social media and you’ll still see plenty of it. The this-country-is-a-kip brigade, touting a form of defeatist nihilism.
But over the past 30 years or so, that feeling started to shift, for various reasons: sport, the economic upturn, the arts, a generation coming into adulthood who weren’t stymied by the past. Ireland achieved a maturity, a greater sense of itself, with the effect that the defeat in Paris didn’t trigger waves of self-doubt. Disappointment, of course. But it didn’t change the certainty that ours was and is a world-class team. A different bounce of the ball and we could have won the Rugby World Cup.
Like any other country, Ireland has its problems. But that’s the point: it’s like any other country now. Our difficulties are not specific to being Irish. With good will and creativity, perhaps they can be solved. We know we have the ability to do it.
This morning, before I started writing this, my Wordle score was 36. But I put in “Leafy” instead of “Leaky” for my final guess. Tomorrow, I start again from zero.