It is Possible to Commit no Mistakes and Still Lose

1. Star Trek

I grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was one of those rare things that I could convince my parents to allow me to stay up to the very edge of my bedtime for. Like any young nerd in training I was there for the cool spaceships, the android, the aliens. The normal science fiction things that, I suspect, initially draw most of us to the genre. There were a lot of things that I didn’t appreciate back then, and not only because due to the vagaries of broadcast television and the episodic nature of the show making it hard to even conceive of, much less piece together, a grander story arc in my young brain.

Several years ago, expecting maybe some nostalgia and possibly a few laughs at the special effects, I embarked on a quest to watch all the shows from the start of TNG onwards in release order. I discovered immediately that the first season was rough. Really rough. I grimaced and powered through a few episodes, letting nostalgia carry the day. I was soon rewarded with the discovery that John de Lancie delivers an absolutely wonderful “trickster god in space” performance.

Season 2 is when things really start to pick up and become Star Trek as I imagine it when I hear the name. Season two delivered us some bangers. The Measure of a Man lives in Season Two, which covers ground that is likely familiar to a fan of earlier science fiction literature from the likes of Asimov, but does so in an impactful way. Peak Performance also lives in season 2, and it contains one of the most important quotes from Captain Picard¹

The premise is that Data has lost a game of “Stratagema” (which appears to be some sort of RTS game) against an alien who is referred to as a master of the game. This causes him to think that there’s something wrong with him and to avoid reporting for duty lest he do something wrong due to the mystery problem. The line in question is delivered by Picard, who has come looking for his errant officer, and there’s a lot to unpack there.

“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.”

I won’t be doing that unpacking. The internet loves this line. Go ahead, pop the quote into your favorite search engine. Pages and pages of words have been written and spoken about that line, memes abound (some of them even bothering to get the line right) because it’s so damn good! We don’t need to unpack that box again.

2. Debt

Despite all of that work done by industrious unpackers who recognized the obvious brilliance of the aforementioned quote, we seem to have forgotten the lesson. It’s really, really easy to find disillusioned folks online. I’m given to understand that there’s a student loan delinquency issue that is currently getting worse (alongside other types of debt.) Briefly researching a few non-paywalled ² sites gives a general impression that matches, roughly, my observations in “the wild”.

Generation X (I see you) has a smaller percentage of student loan debtors than Millennials, but they owe more on average. Millennials also seem to have a reasonably hefty burden here. I was, however, surprised to see the numbers for Boomers as high as they are. Gen Z seems to have a lot less of a burden here, but I would wonder if that’s because a lot of them haven’t yet decided to go to college.

I’ve been there too. It’s really, hard to look at that student loan portal. Your mind starts to drift to how many months of rent that would pay for. Some of you may still see a number that represents an amount that could mean a house. Even with the prices of houses in 2025. I don’t think anyone who has had to pay their bills could fault you for that deep feeling of despair that settles into the pit of your stomach like the aftermath of a particularly bad burrito, but with more desperation, when you look at those numbers. I suspect most of them probably feel their own cursed food baby of dread beginning to form as soon as you mention it. They probably feel it right now. Sorry about that.

“Why are you talking about all of this, and what does it have to do with Star Trek?” I hear you asking, furiously searching for a comment section to tell me how this is the worst fan fiction you’ve ever read. Firstly, this is a Wendys. Secondly, I’m getting there.

3. The Pledge

The story I was told by everyone growing up was thus:

1. Go to college (I’m sure they mean you should try hard, do well, and graduate.)
2. Get a job easy-peasy because you now have a golden ticket diploma and are very smart and special
3. Buy a house, get married, work a lot, have some kids, buy a sports car and spend an uncomfortable amount of time washing and waxing it in the driveway.

It never really sat right with me. I skipped college in favor of working, and then I changed my mind and went to college because I was tired of doing manual labor work that wasn’t intellectually satisfying. Besides, office jobs paid better, and I wouldn’t have to deal with bitter people that hated their “lot in life.” ³

Since then, I have seldom used that extremely expensive piece of paper. Granted I could only take the academic world’s aversion to common sense, doing anything from this century, and actually accomplishing anything in a timely fashion, for long enough to get an Associates degree and run. But overall I considered it a massive waste of time and money. I still do. I learned most of the skills that I use on a daily basis either on my own time, or on the job. You know, where real problems arise that lack a clear-cut solution, and filling in the bubble for C (carefully and completely) isn’t going to cut it.

This story is roughly the same story that most Gen X and Millennials I have spoken with heard. Although a lot of them will try and say that they loved college. I don’t know if I’m missing the region of the brain that finds comfort in pointless exercises with a tenuous relationship to reality and only a passing familiarity with utility, or if they are just trying to see the silver lining when they look at their student loan statement and imagine what else they could have done with that money.

4. The Turn

So when you combine these debt numbers with the narrative society told you, is it any surprise that people are angry or hopeless? Have you seen one of the videos of some poor Gen Z kid having a meltdown over not being able to find a job? I feel the same most days. I’m just older, and more dead inside. It’s easy to say “look at this entitled kid who thinks they should have a job just because they interviewed.” And to be fair, you’d not be totally out of line for making that judgement. But why exactly do they think that? It couldn’t be a decade or more of their young lives spent hearing “you just walk in to the store, give them a firm handshake and your resume, and get a job” could it?

That’s the other half of the narrative. You just go hand someone a resume, get the job, and get to work. But that was barely a thing when I was trying to get my first jobs. It’s almost unthinkable now for any large franchise or corporate job. Nowhere in that fun little fiction is there the part where you spend hours writing a resume, and then die inside a little while you fill in all the same info on the application. Even referrals, once a surefire way to land your next job, seem to be less effective now, I’ve had several that went nowhere.

All so that you can either be ghosted, or get a form letter that might still contain placeholders because nobody even bothered to set up their Applicant Rejection System. “Thank you for applying to [position] at [company]” indeed! Even if the placeholders are filled in, the responses will almost invariably contain some form of “other candidates who more closely fit our needs.” There’s a lot more to say about that process, perhaps in another post. But given the fact that we have done all the things that we were told by our “elders” would guarantee success, is it any surprise that we are mad when it all turns out to be a lie? Is it any surprise that we have forgotten our Star Trek?

It’s hard to maintain that level of optimism. I generally consider myself an optimist, and some days I struggle to keep my chin up just as much as anyone else. Life isn’t what we were promised, but it’s not our fault. And I don’t think everyone intentionally gave us bad advice. At least not the folks who didn’t stand to gain anything by misleading us. So whose fault is it? Everyone’s, nobody’s. It doesn’t matter. We committed no mistake, we lost. Now we have to decide what to do about it. The job market is awful right now, people are struggling everywhere.

5. The Prestige

“Quiet Quitting” and “The Great Resignation” might not look like such a great idea in hindsight, but they represent something important I think. People seem to have decided that there is a line, that work shouldn’t be their life. Personally, I like work. I like to make things, or to put them right. I’ve still had jobs that sucked all the joy out of my life. I have had coworkers at those jobs who shrugged and said “I find meaning outside of work.” But I very much disagree with that, and with the notion that it is sustainable. I utterly fail to see how an activity that you spend roughly half of your waking hours performing 5 days of the week can NOT have a massive impact on your wellbeing.

Gen Z is regularly said to be prioritizing work that has meaning to them, and to be rejecting bullshit jobs. That’s inspiring. They are rejecting the corporate nonsense and trying to carve out a place for themselves in the world where they can hang on to the precious little sanity they have left. They seem to have spotted the con most of us missed. And I applaud them for it.

“But I work with one of them there Zoomers, and they are an obnoxious little brat” I hear you say. Yeah, that happens. I’ve worked with people from all generations that were a pain in my ass. We’re generalizing here, and being Star Trek optimistic, damn it.

OK, so what do we do? Good question. I wish I had an answer to that, I really do. But here is what I hope to see. I hope to see all of us that are fed up with things as they are start “disrupting” the status quo. I hope to see people that have been laid off one too many times, or can’t stomach using an awful SaaS product any longer, decide to build the next thing. I hope to see the death of the rot economy because these same people have decided that the product of their efforts is actually the product, and not just the company being sold off to the highest bidder to be enshittified.

I also hope that we can once again invest in smart people, and help them grow. Because the current “find a unicorn” approach is killing the talent pool. We need entry level jobs to come back, because eventually everyone that knows how to do things will exit the workforce one way or another, and then who will take over? ⁴

If any of this resonated with you, you’re one of us. If you have a degree and are slowly watching the rejection letter collection grow while your savings dwindle, welcome. If you have a bullshit job that you hate but are terrified to leave because you have to pay the bills, or live in fear of meetings scheduled at the last minute. I invite you all to try making things better, in any way that you feel capable.

This blog, and Mongoose Studios, is me exploring what I can build. To try and make things that are good, and that I can be proud of. If this someday helps to put me in a position where I have the ability to address some of these other points, I shall consider myself extremely lucky.

6. Our Continuing Mission

“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.”

When we view Captain Picard’s words through the optimistic lens of the Star Trek universe, we need to approach it as though we are a member of Starfleet. Which is really to say that we are going to aspire to be a version of humanity that embodies our best attributes. While it may be possible to lose in spite of doing all the things we were supposed to, we will not throw our hands up and ask “why even bother then?” We will not hide in our quarters paralyzed by our inability to figure out why things didn’t work out as we expected.

We will do our best to accept that we lost this one, despite committing no mistakes. And then we’re going to go reconfigure the main deflector dish to emit a fucking neutrino beam. We are going to try our best to solve this problem, and the next problem, and we’re going to keep doing that. Because that’s what we do.

We boldly go where no one has gone before.