TOW #26- Article "Happiness is a Glass Half Empty" by Oliver Burkeman

Goals: My writing and reading goals for this TOW are to successfully identify rhetorical strategies and devices that the author uses to achieve his purpose. Also, I want to choose a particularly challenging, possibly lengthy, piece of text to construct my TOW from.

In a world in which success is equated to happiness, author Oliver Burkeman hypothesizes that happiness is a result of learning to be content with losing: " Failure is everywhere. It's just that most of the time we'd rather avoid confronting that fact." In Ann Arbor, Michigan lays a museum of failed products. Products that met the market and almost immediately went under like: caffeinated beer, self-heating soup cans, and microwavable scrambled eggs. The museum was started by a man who wanted to accumulate all the products that recently went on the market starting in 1960. However, years later he realized that most of the products he had purchased had gone under. "According to some estimates, the failure rate is as high as 90%. Simply by collecting new products indiscriminately, McMath had ensured that his hoard would come to consist overwhelmingly of unsuccessful ones." Burkeman begins to cite modern philosophy's belief that success is the act of something going right. However, he acknowledges that Greek and Roman philosophy believed in the opposite: Our relentless struggle to achieve success, or the perpetuated idea of happiness, is exactly what is making us unhappy. Burkeman brings up Greek and Roman philosophers to bring other theories to light and suggest another path to happiness. "This involves learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity and becoming familiar with failure. In order to be truly happy, it turns out, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions – or, at the very least, to stop running quite so hard from them." Burkeman uses the pronoun "we" to draw his audience in and involve them in the conversation. Unhappiness is guaranteed at some point in life and Burkeman is drawing on this shared experience. He's rallying the audience to accept failure as opposed to dreading it; learning instead of running. Burkeman simply wanted to change the way his audience thinks of failure through different theories of success.