When judging whether someone is a loser, it would help to determine what the actual contest is. If the contest is life, it would be helpful to ask oneself if life is a game or not. If life is a game, winning is not important; it is a trifle, a little ego-boost that gives one satisfaction and bragging rights. If it’s something a little more serious, it does mean that winning would be important.

Has anyone won life yet, whatever it is? I see people who are successful, proud parents of children who are brought into this world to navigate this maze of doom with the help of their parents and then maybe go on to have kids of their own. But humanity as a whole has definitely not won the game of life, and so people successful in human societies could very well be nature’s losers.

Living a happy life only to see the planet destroyed, the climate irreversibly messed with, vast amounts of species dying, and other horrors makes it seem like one is not part of a winning system, but perhaps a corrupt system that is completely destructive. Non-participants in the system are judged as losers, but they are perhaps not losers when it comes to nature; perhaps nature will remember their impact long after the riff-raff of smiling winners goes to their graves. Or perhaps we’ll all die and not win, nature will take the whole chessboard and throw it at the wall and scatter the pieces into oblivion.

Humans like to denigrate others; it’s part of our tendency to blame, to judge others and assess ourselves as important in the scheme of things. It gives our life meaning to be the judges, the arbiters of who is considered a winner and a who is considered a loser. Here is my judgment as to whether someone is a winner, it is based on this question: Does one succeed in what one sets out to do?

If you don’t set out to do anything, you are not a loser. You’re not part of the game even, so how can you lose? If my goal is to live with my parents and write poetry, make cool websites in my spare time, and compose music that few people want to hear but which I like, then I have succeeded and I am a winner.

No one’s criteria matters except for the players’ own. If you do not set out to do what society considers to be winning behavior, you are not a loser just because you do not care to do this. You honestly cannot be a loser if you don’t care what others think and you accomplish what you want to accomplish. It is basically incompetence that makes one a loser; inability to accomplish goals is the hallmark of loserdom. Failing at everything that one does makes one a loser.

Asking too much of life is a great way to be a loser. To accomplish one’s desires, start small, don’t bite off more than you can chew. If you succeed at that, you’re winning. Then you can move up, biting off a little more. If you succeed at that, you’re a winner. If you have oxygen, a roof over your head, food, potable water, a place to bathe, and clothes, that’s a good start. You’ve succeeded in procuring these things; you can move up from there.

Generally, one should set out to do the things that one can accomplish, what comes naturally to oneself. We are generally attracted to what we are naturally good at, and trying to do something that goes against this is not a recipe for success. Being able to step outside of one’s comfort zone is good, but it should be temporary. One is attracted to certain things in life, where one can shine. For some it is doing things that will make them gazillionaires and gain them fame and reknown. For others, it’s writing things that are meaningful to themselves and few others and which earn them almost nothing.

I set out to be a writer and experimental musician. I did not set out to write a book that makes the New York Times best-seller list or get signed to Sony Records. I am good in the shadows, the shadows are my place. I would not consider myself a winner (or a loser) if I wrote a successful book, and I do not consider myself a loser now.