The Inner Monologue

There is a cynical comfort in dismissing failed ideas. “Another waste of time,” we say, as we scroll past a new gadget that flopped, a social movement that fizzled, or a startup that burned through its funding. We treat these failures as clutter — the debris field of human overconfidence. But the truth is far more interesting, and far more hopeful. The debris field is the process.

The continual introduction of new solutions to old problems — however misguided, redundant, or absurd they may appear — is not a pathology of modern civilization. It is civilization. Every age of progress has been an age of experimentation. Every great leap forward has stood atop a landfill of discarded attempts. To reject failure is to reject the mechanism by which we learn what success even looks like.

The Spaghetti Theory of Progress

The old cliché — “throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks” — is meant to mock inefficiency. It conjures images of a frantic chef with no recipe and a messy kitchen. But in practice, that’s how recipes are written. A cook who never experiments never invents anything new.

In this analogy, the wall is history. The spaghetti are our collective ideas. And the act of throwing them — again and again — is what keeps the human story moving forward. A few strands stick and feed us all. The rest fall to the floor, uncelebrated, but their fall is not in vain. Because what mattered most was not that they stuck, but that they were thrown.

Every failed invention, every half-baked theory, every short-lived reform movement was an essential proof-of-concept — not because it worked, but because it was tested. Each one changed the texture of the wall just a bit. It roughened the surface, making it easier for the next strand to hold.

That’s the paradox of progress: most solutions fail, yet most failures are successes in disguise. They reveal the edges of what’s possible. They map the terrain of the unknown. They turn boldness into knowledge.

Failure as Fertilizer

If success is the fruit, failure is the soil. The world’s most transformative innovations — from the light bulb to the vaccine to the internet — were cultivated in vast fields of failure.

Thomas Edison, when asked about his thousands of failed filament experiments, famously said he hadn’t failed at all: he’d simply found thousands of ways that didn’t work. His genius wasn’t brilliance alone; it was endurance. Likewise, the first vaccines emerged only after centuries of superstitious remedies, half-effective potions, and dangerous experiments. Most attempts to fly ended in splinters before the Wright brothers left the ground. And most computer companies that tried to bring the internet to the masses in the 1990s went bankrupt. But without their failures, the infrastructure — and the lessons — for the successes would never have existed.

To view this differently is to misunderstand evolution itself. Nature doesn’t design perfect solutions. It tries everything — endlessly, wastefully, beautifully — and lets the best outcomes persist. Evolution is the ultimate spaghetti thrower. Life’s diversity and complexity are not evidence of intelligent design; they’re proof that trial and error works.

Humanity, at its best, emulates that same messy persistence. We are the only species that deliberately adds new spaghetti to the wall of existence — not just biologically, but ideologically, technologically, culturally. We test systems of governance, ways of thinking, modes of living. Most collapse. But the few that endure become civilization’s scaffolding.

The Courage to Keep Trying

The problem is that failure is expensive — in money, in reputation, in morale. Modern society worships efficiency, and efficiency despises the experimental. Investors, politicians, and even educators are increasingly allergic to anything that can’t demonstrate immediate returns. We have built a culture that mistakes iteration for waste.

Yet, without this tolerance for failure, stagnation creeps in. The societies that stop experimenting stop advancing. History is full of cultures that grew so enamored with their proven successes that they abandoned risk altogether. They became curators of their own greatness rather than creators of the next chapter. When the wall was full, they stopped throwing.

To keep progress alive, we need to rehabilitate failure’s reputation. We need to see every unadopted idea not as a waste but as a necessary act of creative courage. Every rejected proposal, every prototype that doesn’t sell, every bold experiment that collapses under its own ambition — these are the oxygen of innovation. They teach us where the limits are and how to push past them.

Even bad ideas are productive. They sharpen our critical thinking. They provoke better questions. They force us to articulate why we reject them — and in doing so, clarify what we truly value.

The Success of Unadopted Solutions

Here’s the key insight: even the solutions that fail have succeeded in the act of being tried. The unadopted policy proposal, the abandoned technology, the forgotten artistic movement — all of them left data behind. They changed what was thinkable. They made the improbable slightly more probable next time.

Take, for instance, the early electric cars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They “failed” — outcompeted by gasoline engines and limited by primitive batteries. But those failures weren’t wasted. They kept the dream alive, and a century later, they returned with better tools. The EV revolution isn’t new; it’s version 3.0 of a dream that’s been rebooting for 120 years.

Similarly, countless failed attempts at renewable energy, social reform, and space exploration have all contributed to the successes we now take for granted. The first dozen rockets that exploded weren’t disasters; they were prerequisites for Apollo. Each unsuccessful reform movement made the next one more strategic, more sophisticated, more aligned with public will.

The unadopted solutions were not wasted efforts. They were data points. They were breadcrumbs left along the path of human learning.

The Myth of the Clean Wall

We love the fantasy of the clean wall — a world where only the best ideas are ever attempted, where efficiency reigns, and every action produces immediate progress. It’s a tempting vision, especially for bureaucrats, investors, and critics. But it’s also a delusion. A clean wall means no spaghetti has been thrown in a long time. It means the system has calcified, that fear of failure has overtaken curiosity.

Mess is the mark of motion. A world that’s alive is a world covered in sticky residue — projects half-done, experiments half-successful, and people half-sure. The clean wall is the museum of a civilization that stopped trying.

The Moral of the Mess

So perhaps the real measure of a thriving society is not its success rate but its attempt rate. How many problems are we still brave enough to attack, knowing most of our efforts will fail? How many new solutions are we still willing to try, knowing the wall is already crowded?

We should celebrate the failures that make future successes possible. Every student who invents something useless, every entrepreneur who builds a company that dies, every reformer who sparks a movement that fades — they are not embarrassments of the system. They are proof that the system still works.

Because in the end, progress isn’t a series of victories. It’s a cascade of attempts. The wall is never finished. The spaghetti never stops flying. And that’s how we know we’re still alive.