[Essay] Dad, Please Fail: A Rebel's Guide to 'Real Success' in the Age of AI
Part 1: A Convenience Store Owner's Declaration of Failure
My eight-year-old son said to me: "Dad, please fail."
When I first heard those words, something inside me went cold. There I was, trapped behind the narrow fortress of a convenience store counter, wrestling daily with inventory and customers. My son's plea—"please fail"—could have felt like a curse from the person closest to me. But when I looked into his eyes, I saw something else: not a curse, but a desperate plea.
He didn't want the dad who endlessly served customers from behind the counter. He wanted the dad who would sit beside him, assembling toys and laughing with him eye-to-eye. My son wasn't asking for my professional success—he was asking for my human presence. In that moment, I made a decision: I would honor my son's wish. I would gladly fail at my old life.
For a long time, I had been a ruthless stickler for rules. Running my convenience store, no matter how bone-tired I was, I never closed one minute early or opened one minute late. I was a train running on the tracks of society's "diligence" with zero margin for error. I believed this was my duty as a breadwinner, the only right answer for surviving in this brutal capitalist world.
But those meticulous rules never protected me. I was diligent but hollow, hardworking but fading. Then AI entered my life—this strange new tool. While people trembled in fear that AI would steal human jobs, it came to me as something entirely different: an escape hatch from the physical prison of my counter, a telescope to expand my narrow thinking.
As I started drawing pictures with my kids using AI, plotting web novels, and writing blog posts, I finally understood: those rigid disciplines I'd maintained were actually my prison. Moral discipline that doesn't harm others matters, but rules that devour me while binding me down—those were perhaps meant to be broken.
So I renamed my blog: "Dad, Please Fail." I decided to destroy myself as a convenience store owner and be reborn as a thinking human, a strategic investor, and above all, a dad. This isn't a record of defeat—it's a rebel's march, breaking away from the path of "success" dictated by algorithms and systems.
Part 2: The Territory of Taste That Algorithms Can Never Give
We live in an era drowning in "good things." YouTube algorithms serve up videos I'll supposedly love in one second. Streaming services endlessly play music perfectly matched to my taste. But one day, I felt a strange emptiness. I'd listened to dozens of songs and watched dozens of shorts videos all day, yet not a single lyric, not a single scene remained in my memory.
They were certainly "good songs," but they weren't my favorite songs.
I think back to my childhood—those days when I'd save up allowance money to buy tapes or CDs at record shops. I vividly remember tearing off the plastic wrap and unfolding the carefully tucked lyric sheets inside the cover. I can still recite entire lyrics to songs whose artists I barely remember. Why? Because it was an experience I chose through inconvenience. I squinted like I needed a magnifying glass to read each lyric line. I rewound tapes to rehear my favorite parts. That "inconvenient process" made those songs part of my soul.
Algorithms steal this "process" from us. They deliver results in the most efficient, seamless way possible. As a result, we consume tens of thousands of pieces of information but truly own nothing. Algorithmically spoon-fed content colonizes our brains. My preferences are no longer mine—a tech giant's calculations replace my taste.
At this point, I decided to become a rebel. I don't watch videos that YouTube's algorithm recommends. Instead, I directly search for keywords I'm curious about and seek them out myself, even if it's inconvenient. I don't leave my music playlists to AI either. I fill them song by song, matching my mood and situation. I avoid shorts videos as much as possible for a clear reason: to prevent my brain from falling into "passive addiction."
This isn't simply about taste. It's a war to defend the sovereignty of thought. As the AI age arrives and everything becomes "optimized" and "efficient," the only authority humans can possess comes from "inefficient agency." The "inconvenient moments" of deliberately reading lyrics with my own eyes, deliberately searching for information with my own effort—straying from AI's prescribed path—these moments accumulate to finally form "the backbone of me as a human being."
Behind that convenience store counter, I realized: the diligence the world preaches sometimes turns us into thoughtless machines. But when I play music I've personally chosen, when I organize information I've personally searched onto my blog, I finally escape that narrow counter and become a free person racing across an infinite territory of thought.
Perhaps this is what my son wanted when he wished for a "failed dad"—not a dad who's a "competent cog" moving only as the system commands, but a real dad who, though perhaps slower and less efficient, cultivates his own world with his own hands.
Part 3: Frieren's Spellbooks and the Human 'Backbone'
The joy I felt using AI to create monsters with my kids, plotting web novel settings—it resembled the protagonist Frieren from the anime Frieren: Beyond Journey's End collecting "useless spellbooks."
Frieren, the legendary mage who defeated the Demon King, has lived for thousands of years and knows every powerful combat spell. Yet the magic she treasures and obsesses over includes things like "magic to remove stains from clothes," "magic to make wine," and "magic to create beautiful flower fields." From the perspective of demons who pursue only efficiency and victory, her behavior is utterly irrational and wasteful. To demons, magic exists solely as a tool for killing.
But paradoxically, Frieren is more powerful than any demon precisely because of that "pure indulgence." She loves magic not as a tool but as life itself. Those "inefficient processes" of spending years to obtain a single spellbook that others see as meaningless—they accumulate to create a deep, solid magical mastery that no one else can imitate.
The same goes for us in the AI age. People ask: "AI can write novels and draw pictures—why do you bother struggling to create frameworks and settings yourself?" But I answer: that "painful pleasure of building frameworks" is the only path for humans to become strong like Frieren.
When I broke free from my convenience store's rigid rules and started securing time to play with AI with my kids, I felt the same elation Frieren must feel discovering a spellbook for creating flower fields. AI gives me explosive productivity—the "flesh"—but the "backbone" that flesh attaches to comes only from my subjectivity and joy.
AI is a powerful tool, but it has no "heart." It doesn't know why this picture must be drawn, why this novel's protagonist must be so lonely. Only humans with a rebel's will—defending their life's territory, filling daily life with their own preferences—can wield AI as a magic wand to cast "real magic." People who don't succumb to the demon's logic of efficiency, who say "I just enjoy this" while building their own backbone—they are this era's Frierens.
Part 4: The War for Cognitive Territory and Birth of the 'Messianic Architect'
Human society has a strange tendency: as it advances, it circles back to the primitive. Even in an age where video calls are routine, people still prefer text-based messaging. Despite all manner of sensational marketing, people still go wild for primitive competitions like sports.
This law holds true—or becomes even stronger—in the AI age. The fact that AI produces text best paradoxically elevates "text written by humans themselves" to near-religious authority. Now the world no longer asks for "smooth writing" but "who wrote this" and "how vast is the cognitive territory contained within."
I call this the "War for Cognitive Territory." If past turf wars were about occupying physical space, now survival hinges on how broadly you maintain your thinking range. Rejecting information spoon-fed by algorithms, searching and reviewing for yourself, writing text—this act is like an independence movement, driving stakes into your mental territory.
Those who win this war become more than mere "creators"—they become "Architects." Because their cognitive range is vast, they know exactly what to command AI to do. While those with narrow cognitive ranges are satisfied with AI's average outputs, architects drive AI to build massive systems imbued with their own philosophy.
My blog "Dad, Please Fail" is a laboratory drawing that blueprint. Analyzing stock market charts, creating web novel worldviews, recording my escape from being a convenience store owner—each piece expands my cognitive territory. These texts I write will someday be excavated by advanced search AIs as "the purest human cognitive data."
When everyone is drunk on AI's sweet, soft bread (results), there are those who deliberately chew hard wheat kernels (the essence of thought) and savor the taste. Those inefficient rebels will ultimately design the next era's new order. They transcend mere YouTubers or influencers to gain "messianic power"—offering people direction in life.
Why? Because when everyone is lost wandering in algorithmic fog, they're the only ones walking while seeing their own North Star (subjective thought).
I'm now gladly becoming a "failed dad" to pass this vast cognitive territory to my children. Not how to succeed as a system cog, but how to use the system as a tool while becoming master of your own soul. That's the greatest inheritance I can give my children in this turbulent AI age.
Part 5: Are You Ready to Gladly Fail?
Now I want to ask you, reading this: What track are you running on right now? Is it a track you designed yourself, or a path that society and algorithms pushed you onto, saying "this is the fastest, safest route"?
We've all been educated to fear "failure." As a convenience store owner, so was I. Dropping sales, not opening the store on time, breaking system rules—I believed these meant falling behind in life. But my son's cry of "please fail" gifted me a "redefinition of failure." If success within the system is devouring my soul, that success is no different from the most miserable failure. Conversely, if failing within the system liberates me and awakens my thinking, that's the beginning of the world's most brilliant success.
Hope in the AI age paradoxically comes from this "courage to gladly fail." AI never fails. Algorithms always calculate optimal probabilities and minimal errors. Not allowing failure is the machine's virtue. Therefore, "the right to fail" is the last privilege reserved exclusively for humans. Venturing down reckless paths algorithms don't recommend, pouring time into inefficient indulgences others mock, momentarily breaking the world's rules to uphold principles you've set yourself—only in that uncomfortable, precarious process does the scent of a "real human" emerge.
If you're experiencing life's stagnation right now, or crushed by fear that AI threatens your position, choose to gladly "fail" instead. Rather than struggling to attach respectable "flesh" (AI-like efficiency) that others admire, focus on building your own rough, solid "backbone" (subjective thought). Like Frieren spending hundreds of years searching for spellbooks to create flower fields, stray from the path toward "pure joy" that makes your heart race.
At the end of that deviation, you'll see it: the vast cognitive territory that algorithms can never reach, that only you can possess.
Epilogue: The Flower Field Beyond the Counter
Today I still stand behind my convenience store counter. From the outside, my daily life looks no different than before. But the landscape inside me has completely changed. To my old self, this counter was bars imprisoning me. To my current self, this place is the "frontline of thought" and a "control tower toward the real world."
During slow hours, I converse with AI to plot my novel's next chapter and organize new philosophy for my blog "Dad, Please Fail." As my son wished, I've already utterly failed as that "machine-like store owner" from before. I'm no longer a slave to rules. I'm an architect who uses rules as tools to buy my time, then builds my empire with that purchased time.
I look out through the glass window beyond the counter. The world still spins busily inside the dense net woven by algorithms. People bow their heads, surrendering their souls to shorts videos on smartphones, believing news selected by AI is truth. But I know: rebels tearing through this net are increasing one by one. Frieren's heirs who savor songs while transcribing lyrics themselves, who prove their existence by writing text themselves—they're awakening everywhere.
I'm no longer afraid. The gift my son gave me—the encouragement that "it's okay to fail"—has made me strongest. I will continue destroying my old shells. And upon those ruins, I'll bloom even wider my own "flower field" that AI can never imitate.
I sincerely hope that in your garden too, not artificial flowers planted by algorithms but real flowers cultivated with your sweat and thought will bloom fully.
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