The Year is Over. The Book is Here.

How to Fail at Life (And Why You Shouldn’t Stop)

Let’s be honest: 2025 wasn’t a year. It was a long, unpaid internship in existential dread, where the only promotion you got was the slow realization that your life was a spreadsheet of half-finished goals and a digital footprint of abandoned dreams. And now, like a particularly ungrateful artist, we’ve taken that collective sigh and pressed it into a book—not as a victory lap, but as a funeral pyre for the era of “almost.” Welcome to Miserable: How to Fail at Life, a 174-page manifesto in the form of a tombstone, a self-immolation by proxy, and the most honest thing we’ve ever written. Because the only thing worse than failing at life is failing at life and pretending you didn’t.

This isn’t a how-to guide. It’s a how-not-to, a reverse playbook for the chronically unmotivated, and a middle finger to the self-help industry that sold you the lie that grit alone could turn you into a success. If you’ve ever scrolled past another TED Talk about “leaning into discomfort” while secretly wondering if your life was just one bad algorithm away from collapse, then this is your exorcism. Below, we’ve distilled our decades of professional procrastination into a step-by-step recipe for mediocrity—because sometimes, the best way to fail is to do it on purpose.

How to Fail at Life

Yields: A life that looks like a half-empty glass, a resume that reads like a haiku, and a **therapist who’s seen it all.

Ingredients:

1 part unchecked email inbox (preferably with 1,243 unread messages)
2 parts half-finished projects (bonus points if they’re on your phone’s “Drafts” folder)
3 parts procrastination (the art of delaying until the last possible second, then panicking)
4 parts self-doubt (the silent partner in every failed endeavor)
5 parts caffeine (to keep you functionally alive while your life rot-sets in place)
6 parts social media envy (the fuel that keeps you scrolling instead of shipping)
7 parts “I’ll do it tomorrow” (the mantra of the chronically unproductive)
8 parts regret (the aftertaste of every well-intentioned but never executed plan)
1 dash existential dread (for flavor)

Instructions:

Start with a grand vision. Write down three life goals on a sticky note. Make them ambitious but vague—things like “Become a better person” or “Find true love.” (Pro tip: If you can’t quantify it, you’re already doomed.)

Commentary: This is where most people fail. They overthink the vision instead of just starting. But you? You’re here for the spectacle of failure, so go big or go home.
Create a detailed plan. Spend three hours in a spreadsheet, breaking down your goals into tiny, unachievable milestones. Include color-coded timelines, KPIs, and emotional check-ins. (Example: “Week 3: Feel like a fraud (100%)”).

Commentary: The key here is over-engineering. If the plan looks too simple, you’ll quit before you start. Complexity is your friend.
Set reminders for every task. Schedule daily alerts for things like “Remember to remember to start your side hustle.” Set them for 3 AM so you can snooze them 17 times before finally forgetting about them entirely.

Commentary: This is where productivity apps become your personal jailers. The more you track, the more you procrastinate.
Distract yourself with “research.” Spend two weeks watching YouTube tutorials on how to start your side hustle, but never actually start. Instead, deep-dive into the comments where people argue about capitalism vs. socialism while your life slips through your fingers.

Commentary: This is the art of the “almost.” You’re not failing—you’re just almost failing, which is almost as good.
Blame external factors. When you finally (or don’t) start your project, immediately find an excuse. “The economy is bad.” “My Wi-Fi is slow.” “My cat ate my laptop.” (If your cat is real, this is 100% valid. If it’s just excuses, own it.)

Commentary: Externalizing blame is not lazy—it’s strategic. It’s how you keep the illusion of control while letting life happen to you.
Celebrate small wins. Every time you almost do something, pat yourself on the back. “I opened the document!” “I scrolled to the second page of my to-do list!” Acknowledge progress, even if it’s just the illusion of motion.

Commentary: This is how hustle culture works. You don’t need to win—you just need to look like you’re trying.
Quit before it’s too late. When you’re 90% done (or 0% done, if we’re being honest), declare victory. “This is good enough!” Ship it, even if it’s broken. Done is better than perfect, and perfect is a myth anyway.

Commentary: This is where most people fail. They keep going until they burn out. You? You quit while you’re ahead—of nothing.
Repeat. Rinse and repeat for the rest of your life. Adjust the ingredients as needed—more caffeine, less sleep, endless scrolling—but keep the rhythm. This is not a phase. This is a lifestyle.

Note from the Chef:

We didn’t write this recipe because we believe in failure. We wrote it because we’ve seen what happens when you don’t fail. You get burnout. You get regret. You get **a life that looks like a spreadsheet of half-finished dreams and a therapist’s bill that’s almost as high as your student loans.

This is not a how-to guide. It’s a how-not-to guide. It’s a middle finger to the hustle, a celebration of the “almost,” and a reminder that you’re not alone in your mediocrity. So go ahead. Follow the steps. Fail gloriously. And when you’re old and gray, you can look back and smugly tell your grandkids how you chose your own path—even if that path was a winding detour to nowhere.

Conclusion:

If 2025 taught us anything, it’s that life isn’t a race. It’s a series of half-finished drafts, a digital footprint of abandoned dreams, and a tombstone aesthetic that we’ve all accidentally adopted. This book isn’t here to fix you. It’s here to reflect you back at you—flawed, funny, and fully human.

So read it. Burn it. Ignore it. But remember this: The only thing worse than failing at life is failing at life and pretending you didn’t. And honestly? We’re all in on that.