From Richard’s Selected Correspondence On Facts:
RICHARD: The word ‘loser’ does not have anywhere near the same connotations in this neck of the woods (at least not for my generation anyway) as it does in your part of the world … whereas the word ‘failure’ (as in ‘I am a failure’) does.
Speaking personally, and by any objective criteria, I am a failure big-time: I was a high-school dropout; I was a wartime coward/a peacetime pacifist; I was still a teenager when first married/my first marriage was a shotgun wedding; I had a mental breakdown/identity crisis in my early thirties; I lost my sanity, my wife, my family, my house, my car, my business, my career; I was a homeless person for five years/a bare-footed vagrant sleeping rough; I remarried only to lose my second wife, after the loss of insanity, of identity, of feelings, of reality, of truth, due to the total and permanent incapacity to be loving/compassionate and/or affectionate/ empathetic; I am classified as suffering from a chronic and incurable psychotic disorder/I am derealised, depersonalised, alexithymic, anhedonic; I have no ambition whatsoever/no aim in life at all; I often sit around doing nothing/ quite thoughtless; I am a teetotaller/I rarely socialise; I neither belong to any public organisation, club, guild, or fraternity/ sorority by whatever description, nor go to parties, bars, dances, discos or any other similar social venue; neither do I play competitive sports, support any team or player, or even attend any such sporting events; my main hobbies, apart from boating/ swimming on occasion, are watching television/ pottering about the internet; by going public with my life story I am quite often the recipient of derision, disparagement, scorn, mockery, disdain, belittlement, vilification, denigration, contempt, castigation, disapprobation, denunciation, and condemnation (and discrimination as evidenced by bad-mouthing, backbiting, slander, libel, defamation and a whole range of slurs, smears, censures, admonishments, reproaches, reprovals, and so on) and … and, to cut a long story short, I am currently living in what some call sin (a life of fornication with a live-in divorcée whilst still married to another).
What a failure (a loser) I am, eh?
If failing at a task does not make one a loser then what does succeeding at a task not make one?
…
RICHARD: Perhaps a personal anecdote may be explanatory: many years ago, when in the company of three others, the identity then inhabiting the flesh and blood body typing these words was waxing eloquent about what ‘he’ had achieved/what ‘he’ was yet to achieve, thus far, whereupon a person of the ‘thou shalt not be judgemental’ ilk, who had been listening somewhat impatiently, interrupted the flow of experiential knowledgeability rather brusquely so as to (non-judgementally) assert that ‘his’ problem was that ‘he’ saw life in terms of winners and losers … to which averment ‘he’ replied, with words to the effect, that ‘he’ had no intention whatsoever of allowing blind nature to be the winner.
…
RESPONDENT: Basically you used the urge to be a winner to make the human condition the ‘loser’?
RICHARD: To succeed where no-one had succeeded previously the identity in residence all those years ago desired success like it had never been desired before.