SOURCE - https://brightwanderer.tumblr.com/post/681806049845608448
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I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.
Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.
The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.
| just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success… I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.
I think you are looking into things in a non healthy way.
You are right that success and failure are not binary. Furthermore, every system, be it physical, living, or social, fails sooner or later.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to not fail for as long as possible, for if something brings joy or safety it’s continued success is important. It follows that if something that’s important to someone fails it’s healthy to morn it and to try to learn from it to not repeat the same failure.
why do you call it “fail” when you mean “end”?
Because I mean fail and trying to frame everything as positive, or at worst, neutral is not healthy and will lead to people not acknowledging their feelings?
you claim to challenge a paradigm but you merely inverted it. you are still operating under the illusion of good and bad. things end. other things begin. is one thing good if it leads to bad things? is it bad if it leads to good things? or are we just adding our own transient perspective to it? by passing judgment, we’re creating good and bad.
this has nothing to do with acknowledging feelings or not. feelings are things too. feelings end. feelings create other things, and those too can lead to other things that we might call good or bad. just because we feel a certain way does not mean the events that led us there are good or bad.
so those “failures” have nothing to do with being real with yourself. it’s quite the opposite: you are taking your feelings and attributing them to things in the world.you neglect to recognize them for what they are: transient sensations, that end.
There are failures and there are endings. Not being able to cope with a failure is not healthy. Calling everything that ends automatically a failure is not healthy either.
Agreed, the flip side is allowing something ending to be sad too. Not everything needs a positive spin.
This just reads to me like a classic step of linguistic evolution, where people can’t be bothered to caveat the normal word with a deeper meaning (eg “my business ultimately ended, but it was the right call and it was always be a great time in my life…” etc) and so think a new word is necessary, until inevitably the same thing happens, ad naseum.
This is nice ways of saying you can change perspective on things by using more appropriate words. At no point do your viewpoints clash with op. But success and failure can certainly be binary if you want. They are words and mean different things for different people, and we hope to sometimes communicate a specific point and sometimes a philosophical one. It can be used for much. Failure as a word is useful but also touchy for a lot of modern achievers, or sofa enjoyers. It can be oh so binary for some people. Like, did you vote and try to prevent the faschist uprising that will ruin your life? It’s a yes or no and one of those are very much a failure. If you don’t want to see your failures you will become like the wounded manchildren that has need to use power and assert dominance to exist. At that point there’s not much left of the reflection you wrote about. It’s an antithesis for the practice.
I see where you’re coming from, but I don’t think this post is about giving up all the time. It’s about accepting when something doesn’t work anymore, or isn’t fun anymore.
If you started doing something for fun, but the fun is gone, continuing to do it may actually be detrimental.
Nowhere does the post say that we should just give up, merely that we shouldn’t stigmatize endings.