Should financial success really be a moral imperative? Why do we think that an ordinary kind of life is of lesser worth? Studies have found that our most potent emotional experiences come from relationships, not careers. Those who work in palliative care report that, on their deathbeds, most people don’t regret not having clambered a rung higher, but having worked too hard, and having lost touch with friends.

And history shows it is only when the economy is in the mud that Americans feel free to do what they want to do. As the author J. K. Rowling said so succinctly in her 2008 address to Harvard graduates, failure can mean a “stripping away of the inessential.” When she was an impoverished single mother, she started to write her magical tales: “I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.” This doesn’t mean it is an uplifting experience to be unemployed, of course. But it may mean we ease up on some of the judgment that springs from the false idea that a person without a job has not just hit bad luck or a poor economy—but is a failure. Having a job is hardly the only, or best, measure of a life.

It may also mean we can accept plateaus, understand that a life has troughs we can climb out of, and that a long view is the wisest one. A recession is a great reminder that all of us need to learn, as Samuel Beckett said, to “fail better.” Which means rethinking what we really want to do with our lives, who we want beside us, and how we measure worth. Think of poor Willy Loman. Today his grandchildren might be proud.