Time for an uncoordinated brain fart. let's see where this goes. I am not even sure the title is right, but then again, having failure in there may become accurate...

Here goes the conundrum: People like success. People are human. Humans are prone to failure.

Pretty simple really. Added complications to that are that while there is a chance that success may breed happiness, failure on the other hand will almost definitely breed misery.

None of the above really matters. Onto engineering for failure.

When engineers work on something, they spend a large amount of time on structures and the majority of that again may be for things that are not used as they will be there to cover the possibilities leading to failure.

This is quite clever and can lead to saving many lives and preventing disasters like Chernobyl.

Let's take an example, the helicopter. Let's take a failure - the engine stops. Could be a fault, could be lack of fuel, could be something else, but the engine stops.

That seems like a hopeless situation as helicopters rarely have wings and probably are as able to glide as a blue whale.

However, this possibility of failure has been engineered against - what you do is aim down and pick up speed. No, not for a quick death vs a slow one, but to give the propellers some speed. Last minute you pull up and the propellors that gained some speed through the descent will spin, push air down and slow the helicopter down, hopefully not damaging the crew or good on board.

Quite clever.

In the same way, some processes in life can also be engineered - take a smoker who decides to quit.

Failure number one would be to feel like a smoke, and pull a cigarette out. all too easy. Solution: get rid of the fags. break each one individually and through them into the rubbish bin.

That step will almost guarantee the person in the middle of the night going through the garbage praying that one of the cigarettes are salvageable.

if that fails, the person may or may not go out looking for a store open all night that will supply the "fix".

In the case of giving up smoking, "success" breeds misery as it goes against what you want. To give in can be easy and the simple pleasure of not having to fight yourself overwhelming.

But long term that is (or can cause) a cancer inside yourself.

From here I am supposed to jump and say that sometimes you need to be miserable, but I can't find the logical jump/follow on place. just imagine it is there. along with anything else that would be beyond this part in the post.