A few days ago, I watched a short video from Nigeria. It showed a group of kindergarten children playing musical chairs. Among them was a little girl called Cynthia. The other children approached the game with sharp focus and calculation. They took narrow turns, hovered near the chairs, and moved in a manner that showed they understood the rules. Cynthia, by contrast, wandered wide, almost carefree, giving the chairs a generous berth and sometimes drifting out of the camera’s frame. She seemed unbothered by competition, unhurried, and unconcerned with the logic of the game. Yet, to my and everyone’s surprise, she managed to outlast most of her classmates. In fact, she edged out two of three before finally losing in the last round.

That small moment contains a truth that adults often spend their lives learning: the logic of the world does not always reward the most strategic, the most disciplined, or even the most deserving. You can do everything right, play by every rule, and still lose. And sometimes, the one who seems least prepared or least attentive finds unexpected success. Could Cynthia’s calm detachment be a gentle metaphor for the fragility of the link between effort and outcome?

Human beings are raised to trust in causality. From childhood, we are taught that hard work yields success, obedience brings approval, and goodness earns reward. These lessons form the moral scaffolding of society. Yet life repeatedly exposes their limits. I do not think these principles are false, but could they be incomplete? Between effort and result lies a vast territory governed by chance, timing, bias, and forces beyond our control. Cynthia’s innocent wandering captured this territory perfectly the space where logic meets unpredictability.

The philosopher Albert Camus would have recognised this scene instantly. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he describes a man condemned to push a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down each time. Camus uses Sisyphus to illustrate the absurd condition of human existence, our endless striving in a world that offers no guaranteed meaning or reward. And yet, Camus concludes, one must imagine Sisyphus happy, because his meaning lies not in the outcome but in the act itself. Cynthia’s unhurried dance around the chairs, indifferent to the pressure of winning, carries a similar lesson: there is a kind of grace in participation itself, even when the rules do not bend in your favour.

This truth unsettles modern society because it challenges the ideal of meritocracy, the belief that effort naturally produces success. Meritocracy comforts us by linking morality and outcome, implying that failure is always a personal flaw. But the world is not a spreadsheet; it does not balance equations of virtue and result. Many who do everything right still fall short, while others stumble into success without understanding why. History offers countless examples: honest reformers destroyed by corrupt systems, talented artists ignored in their lifetimes, and communities punished despite resilience and discipline. The unsettling message is that success is not always the harvest of rightness.

The Stoic philosophers, centuries before Camus, wrestled with this same paradox. Epictetus taught that peace lies in distinguishing between what we can control and what we cannot. The will is ours; the outcome belongs to fortune. Marcus Aurelius went further: “You have power over your mind, not outside events.” From a Stoic perspective, the child who plays with joy and detachment is wiser than the one who clings to control, because her happiness does not depend on winning. Cynthia’s wide turns, though illogical, shielded her from anxiety; she engaged fully but without fear of loss. That is perhaps the highest form of wisdom. Action without desperation.

Yet this philosophy is difficult to sustain. For adults, failure often feels personal because it echoes through our sense of identity. We invest effort with meaning; when results betray that effort, the self feels invalidated. Kierkegaard understood this anguish well. He wrote that despair is not simply sadness, but the recognition of one’s limits before an infinite universe. To fail after doing everything right is to stand before those limits and feel how small human control truly is. But within that realisation lies an opening the possibility of humility. Failure teaches that life’s logic is broader than our own reasoning.

From another angle, Nietzsche offers a more defiant interpretation. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he invites us to embrace amor fati, the love of fate. To love fate is not to resign but to affirm, to accept all that happens, including failure, as necessary for becoming who one is. Under this light, Cynthia’s story ceases to be about winning or losing. It becomes a celebration of presence the joy of movement, the music, the moment itself. Her apparent ignorance of the rules becomes, paradoxically, wisdom: she played without the burden of expectation.

This does not mean that effort or discipline is meaningless. It means that their value cannot be measured solely by outcomes. The honest worker who is retrenched, the ethical leader voted out, or the diligent student who falls short in the final exam all inhabit the same philosophical space. What matters, ultimately, is the integrity of engagement, not the trophy at the end. In that sense, failure ceases to be defeat and becomes revelation. It shows us who we are when nothing works, when the world offers no applause.

There is also a quiet beauty in recognising that success sometimes arrives through mystery rather than mastery. Cynthia’s near victory shows us that innocence and play still hold power in a world obsessed with calculation. The heart that moves freely often finds openings the mind cannot foresee. Could it be a reminder that wisdom need not always appear as strategy?

Simone Weil once wrote, “Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it.” Could failure be that void? When effort meets silence, when good intentions meet closed doors, is that emptiness a punishment or an invitation to see differently?

Perhaps the point is not to master the game at all, but to remain awake within it. If outcomes are uncertain, what remains certain is the manner of participation: the tone of our presence, the quality of our engagement, the rhythm of our movement through time. If success is elusive, can sincerity be enough? If the world does not applaud, can we still move with grace?

That brief video of Cynthia looping calmly around the chairs becomes, at least in my mind, less a story about play and more a question about living. What is the measure of a good life? Is it the number of chairs claimed, or the depth of joy in the circling? How many of our own pursuits resemble that game structured, timed, and ruled by music we neither choose nor control? And if we do everything right and still fall short, what then?

So, if the music will stop for us all, and a chair is never guaranteed, what else is there to do but dance? Not with the frantic desperation to win, but with the courage to participate fully to move, to feel, to be present in the brief song we are given. For when the final note fades, will it matter more that you found a seat, or that you knew how to move with sincerity while the music played?