That is one reason there has been another emotional outburst over the story of a woman who committed suicide because her home was going into foreclosure. Losing in the financial game means losing one’s social status and sense of personal worth. The credit score is a self-esteem score for many Americans, and the amount they can borrow at a time is an indication of how well they are doing in life compared to how poorly their neighbors are doing.

Such attitudes and identifications with abstract scores need to stop if people are ever to accept failure as a natural part of their lives, both personally and economically. We all make mistakes, start business that fail, get sick, forget to plan for the future, lose jobs, and find ourselves swinging from success to failure in the blink of an eye. Rather than internalizing failure to the point of suicide or heaping scorn upon others who fail and finding fault where there is none, maybe it is time to reassess our attitude towards failure in general.

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