Almost every aspect of human behavior is classified in terms of “success” or “failure.” From birth we are socialized into a binary structure of winners and losers through playing games, sports and school. This dichotomy is institutionalized in adulthood in terms of professional careers and social status, where we live, , salaries and so on. Even in the private spheres of life, like love and the family, we are ranked as “successes” or “failures.”  society’s definition of this conceptual pair is largely decisive of how we evaluate our lives and it is normative for our choices and actions.

“Success” and “failure” are, thus, essential categories for sustaining and legitimizing the modern structure of society based on continual progress. What we define as success and failure and how we define it depends to a large degree on who has the privilege of formulating problems and this differs between cultures. Unlike the USA, for example, whose self-conception and motive force is provided by the American dream of individual success, during the last century Sweden built up a welfare state that gave priority to the collective prevention of individual failure. But not everybody seeks primarily for success but they have more realistic expectations in life: they simply want an agreeable and bearable situation. But few people consciously seek failure.

From both an existential and a clinical, medical concept, life can be said to consist of a continuous delaying of an inevitable and absolute failure: death. From this argument one might draw the conclusion that the way in which we define failure has been more formative, culturally, psychologically and politically, than how we define success (even if the definitions of the two concepts are intimately connected). 

The Encyclopedia of Failure is divided into chapters that each treat a specific aspect of failure such as “the forgotten,” “the unfinished,” “bitterness,” “misunderstandings,” “frustration” and on “almost succeeding.”