Do we consider the text to be the words on the screen or the ideas within the text itself? As a kind of reaction to a current state of affairs, I wouldn’t be surprised if the core idea of this text is thought up by someone every couple days at least, if only in passing. As long as the conditions which brought this meme about in the first place are sustained, it basically can’t die. I’d say, in that sense, this meme could only be considered successful if it doesn’t get replicated forever, it could only be successful if it dies.

Don’t worry, we’re never gonna give it up.

Salinger is a classic example of this. One of the most celebrated authors of all time. He really only wrote one full novel and then essentially disappeared from public view. Despite this I don’t think anyone would consider him a failed writer by any definition

I think a better, but still not perfect, way to define it would be “This person wants to do X, but can’t support him/her/itself doing it.”

Of course, if you are already rich it doesn’t matter and then it is a bad metric (one of the reasons it isn’t perfect.) However, I think it is a better way to define it. Someone writing a few books as a hobby and then stops are not a failed writer, but someone that wants to be a writer but just can’t support it is.

Basically I think the intent matters, but that is impossible to measure (and people lie about it). So being able to do it as a profession is an ok metric.

It’s pretty cheap to “self publish” your own book. You basically pay printing fees instead of it being covered by the publisher.

Sounds like a crazy idea to me. Next you’ll be saying, end a TV show before the ratings have plummeted to zero.

I’d say it depends on the trajectory, closing a month or two before bankruptcy isn’t really a success.

I am a Trump level successful businessperson, I gathered 132.5 gorillion in investment dollars, pissed 130.75 away on becoming the biggest name in Dwarven Cuck Hentai, and sold it to a Google for .0008 gorillion, half of which was mine!

Pure profit, baybee!

If you part before death, that is a failed marriage tho

Literally until the moment I read your comment, I thought that community was “microbiology memes”

Not on topic, but wow.

And if all else fails: !nowhereelsetoshare@sh.itjust.works

A fair point. However, reading the OP back, it seems to me that they aren’t dismissing “forever” as success. They are only stating that its not the only acceptable definition of it.

The way i see it, some things that require never-ending commitment to be deemed a success and others don’t, but that’s not how society sees it in general.

I think messages like the one in the post are a good thing to read and think about how they apply to your own life.

I disagree with your sentiment, and think the examples work. If your aim was to run a coffee shop forever and you quit, then yes you have failed. If, on the other hand, your aim is to enjoy and have the experience of running a coffee shop, then doing so for two years and stopping is a success. Similarly with a relationship. You can have succeeded in having a mutually fulfilling relationship that you both have happy memories from, even if you then grow apart. It succeeded in its aims of spending time enjoying being a relationship.

I feel like you’re completely missing the point of the post?

The post is a critique of how we as a culture generally these things as failures when we don’t have to. You insisting these examples are failures is not constructive, nor does it disprove OPs point, as the entire post is about how they are seen as failures.

The problem is that people change, places change, environment changes constantly. It was successful but then failed. Was the whole thing a failure or a success? It just was. And then it stopped to be.

The complicated words like success or failure are merely constructs of culture. Is a sun successful when it finally dies?

Anything that is a construct of culture and society can be ignored in the grand scheme of things.

I think it’s more about what we mean by “failure”. That probably sounds silly so I’ll lean into the coffee shop example. Imagine if a coffee shop was successful, but then something beyond the control of the owner happened to make it no longer profitable. In this world, the business may have failed, but it may not be accurate to say the business owner has failed. Or maybe the business becoming less profitable is directly because of the owner, who may be taking less time being active in managing things, perhaps because of other things in their life taking their attention. Again, there’s a sense in which they’re a failure here, but in practice, it may just be that their life circumstances and priorities have changed. It might be failure with respect to the coffee shop, but I don’t think that’s failure with respect to their life. Even if the reason the coffee shop shut was because they didn’t anticipate how stressful it would be and they regret ever attempting this endeavour, I think that considering this a failure risks not acknowledging the growth and learning involved.

I liked the marriage example because I used to be engaged to someone who I spent the first chunk of my adult life with. We broke up because we had grown into people who were no longer compatible, and it was a moderately messy breakup because we didn’t want to acknowledge that fact. I think that in this, and many other relationships I’ve seen, people’s aversion to “failure” causes them to stick it out for far too long in bad relationships, which ironically leads to messier breakups and a situation which is much more clearly a failure.

I think the big problem that OP attempts to highlight is an overly binary view of success. Like with the coffee shop thing, I posed personal and commercial as two different axes of success, and I think there could be more. It encourages us to attempt to gauge the “objective” value of things that are incompatible with that kind of quantification — the bit of your comment about longer lasting friendships is something I actively disagree with you on. Some of my most cherished friendships are ones that belong to the past and it wasn’t because of lack of importance why they stopped because active: most of the time, it was just that we had become different people, in different circumstances, such that our lives were no longer compatible. There is still great love and care that exists between us, but as active friends, things have changed. In a way, these friendships feel like they were actively successful, because of how instrumental they were in helping me grow to the person I am now. I don’t think failure is a useful lens to view outgrowing something

Edit: I worry I have come across as overly argumentative, so I want to clarify pre-emptively that whilst there are aspects of your comment that I disagree with, I appreciate the time you spent writing it because the ways in which I disagreed was thought provoking. The primary reason I wrote my response was more an exercise in articulating myself than an attempt to sway you — this subject area is subjective and nuanced enough that agreeing to disagree is more than fine.

I can understand your perspective, but I want to offer an alternative view, maybe less bound to societal preconceptions. I married my partner for many reasons, financial, wanting to raise a child together, wanting to share my life with them… But staying married for the rest of our lives is a crazy concept for us. The marriage has its purposes, but we both know that life can change and that we could decide that we had a good time, and that now the time has come to move on. A marriage is less romanticised for us, it has practical reasons. I guess being polyamorous helps with defining new relationship ideas on many levels ;)

I think you’re right about embracing failure, but I think this is different: is your kid’s soccer team a failure if they don’t play forever? Or is it a success that they play some games, maybe win once or twice, even just learn and have fun?

Some things in life we seem to label failures if they stop after a season, as if long-term stability were the only true goal.

Not the same philosophy, but also a very useful one. Would go hand in hand with OP

This is a very important point to make.

I made my own post about problems I have with what was posted, but an angle that I would love if more people adopted would be to stop viewing failure as inherently negative and useless in nearly all cases.

Failure can teach you a lot if you are capable of reflection and analysis, and failure happens to everyone, all the time, and is totally normal.

The thing with football is that there is a specific goal (pun very much intended). It’s ok to have a mindset that you’re going to play in a way that makes it unlikely (in the beginning) you’ll achieve that goal (eg play left footed), but if that player never improved, would you still think it’s ‘working’)?

I worked in an industry for many years that was obsessed with goal-setting, and that mindset never appealed to me. I eventually found a book called Goal Free Living by Stephen M. Shapiro. It was a bit of an eye-opener for me, and the phrase “Carry a compass not a map” stayed with me until today. I’ve done several different things since then but I’ll never be famous for any of them as I still keep changing direction.

Maybe the random community would be appropriate too

I can think of two fairly active potential homes for that content: Showerthoughts, which is for random trains of thought that you think others might relate to. Lemmy Be Wholesome is for content that you feel elevates people’s moods, is supportive, shares good vibes and so on.

Nice, thank you.

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !showerthoughts@lemmy.world, !lemmybewholesome@lemmy.world

I only see 3 posts in that community. Is it just me?

Nice community

and thank god it does!

Thanks for letting me know that that community exists! It’s one of my favourite subreddit so there being a Lemmy alternative is great news!