One of the things I find most interesting (and sad) about modern western, especially US, culture is this obsession with winning and losing, with not being a “loser”. This interesting passage illustrates this quite well, even if I don’t completely agree with the idea that earlier societies were simpler.

“One of the most decisive things that happened to narrative in the 19th century had to do with the problematisation of its formal conclusions, whichg closed their narrative circuits in earlier and simpler societies either by way of a happy ending (in fairytales, for example, or romances) or a catastrophic defeat. Those older endings had content, as we might put it in philosophical language; in the new world of money and business, the whole social variety of existential outcomes was slowly reduced to a new set of abstract categories: the opposition between success and failure.”

Fredric Jameson, London Review of Books