Why is everyone suddenly obsessed with “reframing” rejection?

Maybe it’s the generally dismal vibes, or the looming specter of Valentine’s Day—but something’s going on with rejection.

Note the big screen, where our big February romance is shaping up to be Wuthering Heights—a Gothic horror that hinges on Catherine’s early rebuke of Heathcliff. But in the sleek new Emerald Fennell spin, one of the first troubled incels ever put to paper is walking a lot taller over those moors.

On the small screen, the influencer Gabriella Carr recently drew her sizable flock to a rejection spreadsheet, where the video creator and actress means to track all her professional door-slams with an eye to racking ’em up. But the goal of this project isn’t getting a ‘yes.’ It’s hitting 1000 nos.

And in person, a new museum in Canada is celebrating rejections, social and self-inflected. Through today, visitors can peep a “failed” barber’s rusty scissors, a “failed” artist’s unfinished painting, and a dress made of rejection letters, by the artist Shawna Ariel.

Everyone gets a ‘no,’ now and then. But a new cultural script seems to be in the offing. Why are we suddenly so keen to remake rejection as motivating, if not outright chic?

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As Anna Holmes noted in a recent piece on the subject for The Atlantic, a lot of us have a tortured relationship to ambition thanks to certain cultural pressures. Ye olde grimy American striver sensibility has made weathering rejection especially tough—at least for the historically entitled.

But Holmes argues that—if we’re to take lessons from several new studies—an attitude adjustment is possible. “The worst nos can be confidence-shattering,” she writes. “But for people ready to respond not with hardheadedness but with strength and grace, they also offer a rare chance: to pick up the pieces of a broken ego and rebuild.”

In this framing, rejection is almost more a state of mind than a state of affairs. In her consideration of Alison Kinney’s forthcoming United States of Rejection: A Story of Love, Hate, and Hope, Holmes spends most of her ink distinguishing dejection, the psychological symptom, from the ‘no’ that really stops you in your tracks.

In another piece that ran this week in The Guardian, Farrah Jarral cosigned the big R’s character-building qualities—though she gives more shrift to its deleterious effects. (“The realisation that one has been socially excluded induces a sudden chill, like being cast out from a Palaeolithic campsite and left at the mercy of sabre-toothed predators.”)

In her rousing case, rejection is repositioned as a mother of invention. Jarral argues that punk, surrealism, and the Bauhaus movement—among other epoch-defining trends—may never have existed without the initial jump start of society’s disdain. “A reject has less to lose and doesn’t have to behave in the way the group dictates, and from this can come a delicious freedom to play and make,” she writes.

Both cases soothe as much as they sanitize. And taken wholesale, both arguments could be enlisted to support more unhealthy striving, less peace on earth. Carr’s rejection challenge fans a consumerist impulse. Daisy Jones of Vogue noted this, in a recent piece that criticized the “gamifying [of] one’s life in pursuit of success.”

Besides, the idea that we might all might become better people (let alone artists) if only we met rejection with grace runs counter to most human evidence. Like that presented in Tony Tulathimutte’s seismic 2024 collection Rejection.

The characters in Rejection can’t ever seem to pick up the pieces, let alone run from the “sabre-toothed predators.” But it’s that lack of resilience that makes them so cringingly realistic.

Now, grace is obviously nice to aim for—and we wouldn’t call anyone in that book aspirational. But in glamorizing a general springiness, we risk missing worthy exceptions to the rule. Sometimes, a no shouldn’t motivate. Because some people need to be stopped.

(Looking at you, Heathcliff.)

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Scrolling through Carr’s rejection challenge posts, I began to wonder if this new line on rejection had anything to do with the national self-esteem. By claiming to embrace rejection, are we all getting out in front of the obvious? (I.e., that we should be rejected?)

As the super-power fades and fumbles on the world stage, maybe its citizens are evolving preemptively. Because claiming an identity is an act of power. And as Tom Petty said, even the losers get lucky sometimes.

Eyvan Collins, the 34 year old Canadian curator behind the Museum of Personal Failure, might agree. The artist told The Washington Post that their project initially sprouted from a humble wish for catharsis. “At the beginning, maybe selfishly, I was trying to process my own feelings and feel less alone.”

Unlike the texts cited in Jarral’s or Holmes’ essays, the failure museum isn’t interested in drawing lessons from rejection, or cultivating toughness. Failure is self-defined and morally neutral on these walls.

And though the museum is a kind of inventive response itself—not not punk, to borrow Jarral’s example—Collins’ project isn’t about turning pain into anything else. As they told NPR, the goal is “to find beauty in the shared human experience of failure.”

I favor this attitude, personally. If we accept that rejection is a fact of life for everyone, maybe the best thing it can ever be is binding. You don’t always have to rebuild, or bounce back. Let alone seek revenge by annexing the manors of your enemies.

Sometimes a good wallow in good company is just the thing.