Schlitz® and Shot Puts: The Lost Art of Failing

“For the genetic elite, success is attainable, but not guaranteed.” – Gattaca

I heard women are now allowed to join the SAS.  Thank heavens!  There’s no way those lads should be making their own sandwiches.

When I was a kid, life was a buffet of possibilities with a chocolate sauce fountain at the end.  I should know, because I was that greedy little guy piling my plate high with everything from wrestling to chess club to that four ill-fated years of track where I learned that that shot put was never going to go farther than 38’.

Ever.

But it wasn’t just me.  Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s, all of childhood was a sandbox—room to dig, build, and occasionally eat the sand just to see what happened.  Hell, in the 1970s I don’t think mothers stopped smoking while in labor, and then let their kids go free-range until the police brought them home from the kegger at the old gravel pit.  They said I was full of Schlitz®, but I would have differed if I didn’t keep passing out.

An original ad.  Back when ads were based.  And, probably a good enough cook for the SAS.

Outside of cheap watery beer, as a kid I could try everything, suck at half of it, and still have time to ride bikes with my buddies.  I mean, they were imaginary friends, but at least they would stop staring at me when I yelled at them, “stop staring at me”.

The point is, I had time.  Time to dabble, freedom to fail, and a real chance to struggle to find out what made John Wilder tick (spoiler:  booze, tobacco, and women).  I could dream of being an astronaut one week a Green Beret the next, and James Bond the week after.  No one demanded that I pick a lane and stay there, probably because they were too busy smoking and drinking and driving. For me, though, failure was a teacher, not a felony.

Kids today?

They’re not at a buffet.  They forced to pick their entrée at 12 and commit to it like terrier hangs onto a T-bone.

I remember a conversation with a colleague back in Houston, circa 2010.  His daughter, still in middle school, had to choose: volleyball, softball, or tennis.  One single sport, full commitment, no take-backs.

When his girlfriend asked if he was trans, he got so mad that he packed her stuff and left.

This wasn’t just signing up for the school team and seeing how it went.  This meant off-season practices, traveling squads, private coaching, and summer clinics that cost more than my first car.  All this for a kid who, statistically, had a better shot at being struck by lightning than playing at the college level.  In Houston’s mega-sized high schools (the nearest one had 5,000 kids and a football stadium that could shame a small college) only the top 1% even make the team.

The rest?  They’re sidelined, their dreams of spiking a volleyball or swinging a bat relegated to backyard pickup games, if they’re lucky.

Why this insanity? Two culprits: economics and elite overproduction.

First, economics.

Big school districts love their mega-schools.  They’re cheaper per pupil to run, since they have fewer buildings, fewer janitors, more bang for the bureaucratic buck.  Plus, a 5,000-student high school can field a football team that crushes smaller districts and draws 20,000 fans to a stadium that makes my college’s stadium look like a community rec center field for third graders.  In Texas, high school football isn’t a sport; it’s a religion, though they do have better concessions.

But our high school coach wanted us to have a small ghost.  He said he wanted us to show a little team spirit.

And it pays:  Bigger schools mean bigger revenue, bigger crowds, and bigger bragging rights for state titles, but you still only need 45 uniforms and helmets.

The second culprit is trickier:  elite overproduction.

Historian Peter Turchin (who I’ve written about before HERE) points out that societies often churn out more “elites” than they can sustain—too many people vying for too few top spots, whether in politics, business, or, yes, even high school sports.  We see it in our polarized Congress and bloated corporate C-suites, so why not in our kids’ lives?

Parents, schools, and even kids themselves feel the pressure to produce not just good students or athletes but exceptional ones.

The result of this is catastrophic.  It has produced a generation of tweens locked into one sport, one instrument, or one hyper-specialized path, all in the name of building a résumé for elite colleges that demand “well-rounded” applicants who’ve paradoxically had no time to be well-rounded.  Or, you know, they could just have a great DEI score.

Whatever.

Dogs have masters.  Cats have staff.

For the average kid, the stress this creates is brutal.  Kids today face schedules that would make a CEO sweat.  A 14-year-old might have 6 a.m. weight training, school, after-school practice, and a side hustle of “personal development” like SAT prep or violin lessons.

Free time?

That’s for quitters.

Social life?

Catch up on InstaFace® between reps.

The mental toll is real:   you can look around and see kids today are drowning in depression and hopelessness.  Part of this, I’d argue, comes from a life without failure.  Most kids in Houston won’t lose a football game or a wrestling match or a basketball game.  They’ll go and watch, sure, but they don’t get a chance to actually fail.  Without learning that failure is really an option and that tomorrow is another day, every little setback in their life feels like a catastrophe.

Without challenges that force them to fail, adapt, and push through, they hit adulthood brittle, unprepared for real-world setbacks.  I lost at sports in ways that made me want to cry when I was in high school.  I didn’t cry because I’m not gay, but I learned that I could get up in the morning after losing and see that I was still there.  My loss was temporary, but it really did help build may character.  Today’s kids, locked into elite tracks or locked out of actual competition, often don’t face meaningful failure until it’s high-stakes.

By then, the stakes are too high to learn gracefully.  They need safe spaces to crash and burn, like a JV wrestling match where you get pinned by a kid whose armpit smells like grape soda and Cheetos® or a debate club where your argument flops harder than a fish on a dock.

After the Little Rascals finished, Buckwheat became moslem and is now known as Kareem O’Wheat.

When we moved away from Houston’s mega-schools to Modern Mayberry, we did it mainly to escape this madness.  Our kids could try things.  They didn’t have to be the best to play, and they had room to fail without it defining their future or collapsing their ego.

That freedom let them discover who they were, not who a coach or a college admissions board thought they should be.  They’ve learned that the struggle is the goal.

Well, that and the booze, tobacco, and women.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

37 thoughts on “Schlitz® and Shot Puts: The Lost Art of Failing”

  1. Our local school system went the mega-school route a few years ago. Now there is one major county school and one major city school. No one in the region wanted it so the school board did it anyway. All of the great rivalries between local regions are gone as teams have to travel long distances to play other teams. So few kids get to play sports now which means they don’t ever learn about cooperation, competition etc so they are even less prepared for the working world.

    JB

  2. This is the best rant? article? I’ve read in years. My stepson’s three kids are so locked into their specialties it’s ridiculous. Two ride horses in riding contests [expensive and boring] and one gets driven 80 miles twice a week to practice and play basketball. They hardly have time for any other pursuits and their mother is a hoity toity type who’s goal is for those boys to never have a callus on their precious little hands. I grew up working for a father who knew how to work as he started with horses and ended up with small tractors. I started with a ton of physical labor cleaning hog and chicken barns and ended up without livestock though farming a lot of acres with tractors with A/C. I’ve pretty well worn out my body but I wouldn’t change a thing about how I was raised and how I got to this point in my life.

  3. What keeps smacking me in the face when I am out in public is how soft and timid kids, especially little boys, appear to be while younger girls seem to be already fat and getting fatter. You can see the impact of a high calorie, sugar and carb dense diet of ultraprocessed food. Average high school girls today would have been considered fat when I was in school. It is a meme but it is also true, me and a couple of buddies from when I was in high school could beat the crap out of double our number of high school boys from today.

    We are living longer for sure, but are we living better and healthier?

  4. The first step in allowing school kids to sample a buffet of activities involving interaction with others is to get them to look up from their screen. Alabama has taken this step with their FOCUS Act, which went into effect this week. No cellphones, iWatches, earbuds, etc. whatsoever inside the school buildings. Zero. Leave them at home or in a car, and out of your clear plastic purse or backpack, or get expelled.

    A local school board member, Ms. Alverez, is calling this “government overreach”. My granddaughter thinks it is the apocalypse. I think it’s a great idea long overdue.

    https://www.al.com/news/2025/08/caught-with-a-cell-phone-in-school-here-are-the-consequences-at-one-major-alabama-system.html

    Sure, expanded extracurricular participation and exposure to safe failures from FOCUS would be nice, but more importantly I just want to get math classes back up to the 1970 standard I remember from your excellent recent podcast meme. The fact remains, however, that homeschooling is the (lonely) ticket to excellence.

    https://www.quantamagazine.org/at-17-hannah-cairo-solved-a-major-math-mystery-20250801/

  5. Wow John. Another great one. I think your Friday posts are some of your best.

    My experience was similar to yours in that I did a variety of activities growing up (without becoming good at any of them, by the way). Our children did school related activities (plays, sports) but never with the intense focus that “club sports” had, for example. Even in high school (Like so many now, a completely mega-campus) they focused on one or two activities that consumed their time, but that was true of me as well by that point (band and drama, which is probably not a shock). But even then, I still had time for RPGs’ with my friends and even just being a teenager.

    We do not let our children play enough anymore, or at least play things that are real (instead of screens) – heck, we as adults do not play anymore. We are the poorer for it.

  6. My younger grandson started the 9th Grade yesterday at a mega-HS in Suburban Birmingham; 20K football stadium. He played varsity lacrosse as a sub in the 8th grade. This past summer his HS’s two club teams travelled all over the South – Charleston, Columbia, Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Memphis, et al for seemingly every weekend. It’s a 2 day tournament w/ 4 games minimum – unheard of 25 years ago, when his aunt’s HS soccer team (NC Class 3A state finalists her senior year) had a summer schedule that was limited to less than a 100 mile radius and for one game on Saturday afternoon only.

    A woman I dated made a pithy comment to me around 10 years ago toward the end of our relationship. She was Head Majorette, Homecoming Queen, graduated in the Top 5%, etc. She went to Knoxville and was, as she noted, just another sorority girl who could twirl two batons at halftime.

    Big letdown for her; she was accustomed to being the Queen Bee. She was still miserable in her mid-60s last time she texted me several years ago.

    I’m afraid her fate will become widespread with the younger generation.

    1. I’ve only gone to two of my reunions. Moderately enjoyable, but not that great.
      The ones who seemed the saddest were those who were SOMEBODIES in hs. Their life after was a bit of a letdown.

  7. Big schools, big sports teams, and the accumulation of dreams to shatter with reality.

  8. “I heard women are now allowed to join the SAS.”

    Higher attrition rate than Navy SEALs. To quote a famous singing deviant: good luck, babe.

  9. “You dog looks up to you; your cat looks down on you. Your pig regards you as a peer.” I’ve heard this attributed to Winston Churchill, and it’s not clear to me whether by “you” he meant “everyman”, or some specific member of Parliament who deserved a sneer.

    Lathechuck

  10. Here is where that leads…young people won’t be able to buy homes. After Trump is done and we figure out that having a free country takes pain. That will be rejected and youth will drive us to communism..then things get Biblical.

  11. Agree.

    Even a baby chick needs the struggle to get out the egg. If you help it, it dies (fails).

  12. When was the last time you saw neighborhood kids getting together for a pickup game of whiffle ball, soccer or football? Alternately, when was the last time you saw a kid actually mow the grass? I haven’t seen kids do any of these things in over 20 years but it was an everyday occurrence 50 years ago.

    Nowadays all sports are “organized” and mom pays a mowing service to cut the grass. I even hear a lot of parents that are fearful of letting their child outside because they are afraid of child abductions.

    2. Saw both of those things recently – the ballfields around here are open for the kids to play, and mine have been mowing my lawn since 2011 or so.

  13. All sports should lead to Selection. Other than teaching the 2 F’s, and some ability to interact under pressure while enduring pain, they have little intrinsic worth. Tearing up one’s body in pursuit of children’s games is stupid. That should be reserved for active duty activities when not only can we get paid and laid, but most importantly get a rating. Skydiving, recreational SCUBA diving, MMA, etc. That’s like beating your head against a wall because it feels so good when you stop. Worst insanity I’ve ever witnessed was at a Pop Warner game, with Little League a close second. Let kids grow into men and not some kind of fantasy athletes for overcompensating girly boys that managed to procreate.

  14. The burnout is solving the problem and creating parity. Everything returns to the mean, even a bladed pendulum for the creators on the table.

  15. >> what made John Wilder tick (spoiler: booze, tobacco, and women).

    WAIT! WAIT! WAIT!
    Who are you and what did you do with Mr. Wilder?
    The REAL Wilder would have slipped in a PEZ reference.
    Even slow ox know that by now.

  16. Want to feel really stupid? In Texas, you pay for: Taxes for the school district, which fund multi-million dollar stadiums: Admission to said stadium to watch a game: An additional fee to watch the game from the same seats, but better locations to see the action. That’s three times, that you pay, to watch the same game, on hard aluminum benches. You can buy your own butt pad of course. They can shove it. And there is a trail, littered with young men, having destroyed their knees, ankles, etc, and are on crutches, who will never be able to pass a PT test in the Armed Forces, or break into a run again, the rest of their lives. It’s sport alright.

    1. Bingo – though on my team I think (during four years) we had zero serious injuries that would have stopped a PT test.

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