Our culture treats success as virtue and failure as personal flaw. Older traditions – from Greek tragedy to Christian thought – saw failure as meaningful. Recovering that wisdom may be essential to living with dignity in an age of burnout.

“If you have something that you know is different in yourself, then you have to put work into it – you have to work and work and work. You also have to believe in it. But as long as you can stay really true, your aim is true, you can realise your dreams. I do believe that. Because this is what happened.”

This quote from Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page in the closing scene of the new documentary _Becoming Led Zeppelin_ (2025) sounds like the perfect inspirational message: believe in yourself, work hard, and your dreams will come true.

But beneath the uplifting tone lies a troubling cultural logic that moralises success and individualises failure, as if the only meaning life can have is to “make it.”

Led Zeppelin’s success was not simply the product of talent or tenacity. As the film shows, it also depended on a booming record industry, a countercultural audience, and a manager who fiercely protected their creative freedom. Page was undeniably gifted and driven, but to universalise his path is to affirm a culture that leaves little room for the deeper truths found in failure. These truths were once woven into the........

© Pearls and Irritations