The Right to Fail: Fragility, Errors, and New Beginnings in Long-Lived Societies

Living more years also means having more opportunities to make mistakes.

In long-lived societies, where life extends far beyond what for centuries we considered “normal,” error stops being a punctual episode and becomes part of the journey. And yet, we continue to inhabit a culture that penalizes failure, demands perfect coherence, and interprets fragility as defeat.

Perhaps the time has come to articulate an uncomfortable but necessary idea: the right to fail is also a right of longevity.

Error as Part of a Prolonged Life

For a long time, life was understood as a relatively short and predictable sequence: study, work, form a family, retire. Within that scheme, making mistakes was a deviation that had to be corrected as quickly as possible.
But long-lived societies have broken that linearity. Today, a life can include several professional careers, late affective ruptures, personal reinventions after 60, decisions that are made—and revised—at ages once unimaginable.

In this context, failing is not an anomaly: it is a natural consequence of living longer and deciding more often.
Denying error in a prolonged life is denying the human condition itself.

Fragility Is Not Failure

One of the great cultural misunderstandings of our time is to confuse fragility with incompetence.

Aging involves physical, emotional, and cognitive changes. It involves losses, yes—but also learning. Yet the social gaze tends to reduce fragility to a label: dependence, decline, uselessness.

Accepting fragility does not mean renouncing dignity. On the contrary: it is a form of vital honesty.

Long-lived societies need an ethic that recognizes that not everything can be controlled, that not every decision will be right, and that life should not be evaluated only by its outcomes, but by its path.

Fragility does not invalidate; it humanizes.

The Moral Weight of Not Being Allowed to Fail

In a culture obsessed with performance, error is experienced as guilt. This is especially cruel at later ages, when prudence, serenity, and permanent correctness are expected.

Older people are granted experience but denied a margin for error.

A project that does not work out, a misguided financial decision, a relationship that ends late in life—everything seems more serious when it happens “at that age.”

This silent pressure generates fear: fear of trying, of changing, of taking risks.

And without risk, life becomes defensive. Long-lived, but narrow.

Long Lives and the Right to Begin Again

To speak of the right to fail is, in reality, to speak of the right to begin again.

In contexts where life extends for decades longer than was once common, it is no longer reasonable to organize existence as if everything depended on a single correct attempt.

Long lives require social, labor, and cultural structures that accept non-linear trajectories, revisable decisions, and changes of direction without stigma. Because living longer necessarily means deciding more times—and failing more times as well.

This cuts across very concrete domains: senior employment, lifelong learning, personal relationships that change late, access to culture, civic participation, or social engagement in advanced stages of life.

A person of 65 or 70 is not an exhausted project nor a closed biography: they are an open process, still under construction, with the capacity to learn, contribute, and transform.

Recognizing this is not romanticism or voluntarism. It is demographic realism and vital justice in societies that, quite simply, live longer.

Error as Late Learning

One of the privileges of living longer is being able to reread one’s own life.

Seen from a distance, error transforms. What was a stumble can become understanding; what was loss, discernment; what was a mistake, practical wisdom.

Older people do not accumulate certainties; they accumulate judgment.

And that judgment is often born from having failed before.

A society that does not allow error in old age deprives itself of one of its greatest sources of collective learning.

Caring Without Infantilizing

The debate around fragility often drifts toward overprotection that borders on infantilization.

Caring does not mean preventing the other from deciding; it means accompanying decisions, even when risk exists.

In long-lived societies, protecting without canceling autonomy is one of the greatest ethical challenges.

Denying the right to fail “for your own good” can end up denying the right to live fully.

Dignity lies not in never being wrong, but in being able to choose.

A Society That Knows How to Forgive

The right to fail is not only individual; it is collective. A long-lived society must learn to forgive irregular trajectories, late decisions, non-normative paths. It needs narratives that do not glorify only continuous success, but also the capacity to rebuild.

Perhaps true progress does not consist in avoiding error, but in building communities capable of sustaining it without expulsion or shame.

Do you allow yourself to fail today with the same freedom with which you allowed yourself to try when you were younger?