You emerge as a striving, from out of a striving that precedes you, and you persist in spite of knowing it to be futile, and that the very quality of your striving is shabby enough to forestall beginning. Any success would be a way of evading this futility and that would be to fail completely, to gain something would be to have something to lose. In the same way you can't make a success out of failure, you must keep failing sincerely. Only in this way is there any chance of a moment of estrangement from yourself and its essential futility. This is the via negative in an age of endless self-actualisation, the only way to realise that there is no such self, and no such actuality.