The Death of The Lovable Loser

Not a single dry eye in sight. It’s a strictly formal all-black affair. As the casket is lowered, one mourner attempts to jump into the grave and four dudes have to restrain him. He squirms in their unrelenting grip for a moment, all the while whimpering, “No, man.”

No, man.

Grim funeral, right? Well, let me go ahead and disappoint you early on. This isn’t what actually happened. You see, not everyone is afforded the dignity of a teary send-off. Most people get a few fake tears at best when they pass on. A couple of social media posts, emojis galore. Hearts broken, doves fluttering wings and that’s it. On to the next round of messy gossip and achievement announcements. That’s it. Well, the deceased in this story got none of that. I mean, I only know of his death because I was (drunkenly) clumsy enough to accidentally stumble upon his resting place.

(Non) Obituary

There’s this football platitude that goes, “They lost the game, but they won our hearts.” It’s become more of a running joke in recent times, a reminder that doing your best is all good but you can still ultimately come up short. That you have to be focused on winning at all costs, passion be damned. They don’t hand out medals to losers who went down valiantly. Just kind words and a forlorn place in memory. If you watched the most recent World Cup final, the sight of Kylian Mbappe cutting a sorry figure after putting in a performance for the ages still lives in your head. But in the grand scheme of things, does it really matter? Argentina had the last laugh and images of Messi’s triumph broke the Internet. Commiserations to the loser, but the winner makes the headline. The loser becomes a footnote.

It really is what it is.

As It Stands  

Everybody wants to win these days. No. Not just win, but absolutely crush it. To come through on social media with a heavy helping of pressure for everyone following. New job, new location, engagement news, holy matrimony alert, baby news. If that kid turns out halfway decent at academia or sports, everyone will be sure to know. I get that we all wanna be proud of our achievements, big or small, and we want to share the victories with others. And I also get that sometimes we genuinely wanna pop shit and flex.

Yet in every circle, there’s that one person that goes through life with passion and an open mind. If you can’t spot that person in your own circle, chances are it might be you. The lovable loser. The one whose plans (if you can call them that) always go up in smoke. The one who gets up and still believes in love even after enjoying (enduring) a hot streak of shitty relationships. The one whose New Year Resolutions have been through the wire, because the execution is haphazard or non-existent. Yet they still write new ones at the beginning of the year. Being the life of the party is cool if you’re not a walking punchline, and that’s the lot given to the lovable loser. All that never seems to kill that light in their eyes, the promise to stay rambunctious.

How Are We Doing, Really?

There’s only one problem- this description feels like a throwback, a character that would be right at home in a 90s/2000s comedy. If you’re approaching 30 like I am, being a lovable loser is more of an indictment than a joke. The lovable loser is going extinct. Nobody wants to be the poster child of failure in any circle, because we’ve grown meaner as people in the year of our Lord 2024. No room for repeat crash and burn episodes. Especially when the “strong friends” look at you as project to fix, not a human being who needs help and understanding. A human with redeeming qualities and all.

Nobody wants to talk about their losses anymore. While I don’t fault anyone for keeping their personal details to themselves, let’s talk about how disappearance has become more popular than healthy conversation. We’ve taken the “best foot forward” tenet and applied it to virtually every area of our lives. The lovable loser is seen as a burden, an embarrassment. They are faced with a simple choice- shape up or ship out. This is seldom communicated directly, which ironically makes it more humiliating to the lovable loser in the long run.

I worry that I sound like a guy who had a drunken epiphany and decided to bitch about the pressure friends put on each other and how it’s not ideal for every personality type. Or maybe a little rambling won’t hurt.

SOS

The elephant in the room is that modern adulting is challenging for a whole host of reasons. As such, friendships are often stretched to breaking point as life hits us all and we react differently. The sight of a Humpty Dumpty falling apart and waiting to be put back together again…can prove too much for anyone to watch. In the grand scheme of it all, everyone has their own bs to roll, like dung beetles. But it ain’t the same speed for everyone. And if we’re being honest, who doesn’t need help?

When modern friendship culture prompted us to kill the lovable loser, we forgot about the thing called the mirror effect. The lovable loser is a human mirror, a sticky note. A reminder that we are all trying to meander towards the best version of ourselves, whatever that means. Indeed, he is an uncomfortable reminder that not every God-given day is about crushing it. More often, it’s all about not letting the issues of life crush you and your most cherished hopes. Not letting failure seize the pen. Accepting that while there may not be a clear lesson in every loss, you lived and that’s all there is to it.

A New Identity?

Past all the doom and gloom…there could be a whole opportunity to do things differently. After all, a phoenix has to burn before its ascension. Maybe the demise of the lovable loser is just what the doctor ordered. If everything remained the same on the surface, it’d take forever to wake up. In a world where the least self-aware think taking a personality test will help them understand themselves, we may have to rethink all these character types. Cause the truth is, we’re more fluid than we think and our personalities are eternally in flux. Hell, only a few of us can be the same person in different circles. All that pigeonholing of people serves capitalism more than anything- market segmentation, anyone?

Anyone feeling like rewatching a 90s comedy show? As long as it’s not Friends. I hate that show. It does have a well-written lovable loser though.

So maybe we could all do worse than remembering that the lovable loser may no longer be in vogue but a part of him lives on in each and every one of us. And there’s nothing weak about that. It just adds to the wonder of human existence. Or so I think. Here’s to winning at self-acceptance, for better or worse.