The tyranny of the comeback story
Read any well-known piece of writing about failure. The shape is almost always the same:
“I was at rock bottom. I had nothing. Then I learned [LESSON], started [NEW THING], and now I [GOOD OUTCOME].”
The first half is the failure. The second half is the comeback. The whole essay only got written because the comeback happened — without it, the writer would still be at rock bottom and the essay would never exist.
This is the comeback story trap, and it’s worth being angry about.
The structural problem
The structure pretends to be a story about failure. It is not. It is a story about success that uses failure as its setup. The point is the recovery. The failure is the obstacle the recovery overcomes.
This is fine as a kind of writing. It just isn’t honest about what it is. And because almost every published failure essay follows this template, readers absorb a hidden assumption: failure leads to recovery. Failure is the prelude to a better thing. Failure has a happy ending if you write the essay long enough.
Most failures don’t.
Most failures end with the person quietly doing something else, or doing the same thing slightly worse, or just being older with less optimism. The “comeback” is the rare sub-case the survivorship-bias filter selects for. (More on that here: Survivorship bias.)
What this does to readers
If you’ve spent your adult life reading comeback-shaped failure stories, you’ve been quietly trained to expect a comeback after your own failures. So when you fail and a comeback doesn’t materialize on the schedule the essays implied, you feel like the exception. You feel broken in a way the writers weren’t. You start to believe that something specific is wrong with you.
But the comeback story selects for survivors. The version of the article you’d read from the version of the writer who didn’t recover doesn’t exist. It got filed in the drawer of “things I don’t talk about.”
This is the loop Surbias is trying to break, badly and slowly, by being a place to write the version that doesn’t end.
What this does to writers
The comeback structure is comforting to write. It gives the failure a purpose. It puts the writer in a position of retrospective wisdom. “I was lost, then I learned, then I found my way” — there’s a whole self-image built into that sentence.
But writing the comeback version of your story too early can prevent the actual lesson. You force a moral on something that hasn’t finished happening. You make peace with a wound that’s still bleeding. You get the catharsis of resolution without doing the actual processing.
I’ve done this. I’ve written the comeback version of a thing in my head while it was still in motion, and then years later realized the comeback I’d written wasn’t even what happened — I just needed an ending I could live with at the time.
What to write instead
Write the version where there is no resolution. Where you don’t know what the lesson is. Where the next chapter hasn’t started yet, or maybe never will.
That sounds bleak. It isn’t. It’s actually a relief — both to write and to read. It’s a relief because almost everything in life is in the middle of something, and the pretense that we’re constantly in tidy “before / lesson / after” arcs is exhausting.
The good news for readers: when failure stories aren’t packaged as comebacks, they stop being instructive in a generic way and start being recognizable. You stop looking for the takeaway and start looking for the parts that match your own situation. The post stops being a parable and becomes a person.
What this looks like on Surbias
The most-reacted-to stories on the site, almost without exception, don’t have a happy ending and don’t claim a lesson. They describe what happened, who they were before, who they are now, and stop. The reader fills in the rest.
If you’ve been sitting on a story you’ve been waiting to share once it has a comeback chapter — don’t wait. The version without the comeback is the more useful version. The comeback, if it ever comes, can be its own post.
— Juan
Related: The 50-cent rule for sharing failures, Stop putting “lessons learned” at the end