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Found here, where the image also has the text as an ALT image description. https://chaos.social/@saxnot/112349120606446433
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this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2024
1001 points (95.5% liked)
No Stupid Questions
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This is oddly worded and has some strange conceptions.
If you open a coffee shop and can't handle the stress and can't manage to afford to operate it... then you have failed. If you open a coffee shop and run it well for a few years and decide to sell your functioning business or largely step down from active management with new leadership... then you successfully ran a coffeeshop and did not fail at it.
If you marry someone and divorce them, and its anything but a mutually agreed, low to no drama, no fault divorce, then yes the relationship and marriage failed.
Now the book/author example is worded much more sensibly. If you write books for a few years, and can support yourself from this or hell even if you really enjoyed it, and then you move onto something else, I don't think anyone would consider you a failed author. You did the thing, got some works published, excellent, you are a successful author!
A friendship that doesn't last... in most cases, is kind of objectively less of a friendship than one that lasts for a long time. It can still have been a real friendship, but it obviously was not important enough for one or both people to continue it if they ... did not continue it.
People going through hobbies as phases is linguistically literally correct, as many people do this. I do agree though that phrasing this derogatorily as if there is somehow anything wrong with changing hobbies overtime is somehow bad or indicates anything negative, unless youre doing that extremely overenthusiastically and/or fiscally or physically dangerously.
Fandoms do ebb and flow. They rise and fall in popularity and enthusiasm. I again do not really see how this is somehow indicative of a culture that prizes only permanent things.
Perhaps by now its obvious I am autistic but... it doesnt make any sense to praise or criticize a fandom by its popularity alone. Praise or criticize it by the kind of community it fosters, the in jokes, the style, the lasting marka its made on other things, the quality or appeal of its content.
I mean I agree with the ending of this, that temporary things can still have been good, but... yeah a good bit of this person's examples seem to me to be not well thought out.
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.
The original image specifically mentions quitting running the coffeeshop because they can't handle the stress and cannot afford supplies. That is failing at operating a business.
And as I said about relationships, yes, you can have a good relationship that ended on good terms, but a marriage that does not end mutually and amicably (most that end, end badly) is objectively a failure. Perhaps this is old fashioned of me, but I am reasonably certain that in nearly all cases a wedding marries two people for the rest of their lives at least in aspiration, so divorce represents a failure of that mutual aspiration. It is significantly less of a failure if two married people separate on amicable terms, but it still literally is a failure of the concept of marriage.
A friendship that does not persist is objectively not as good or successful or important as one that does, barring exceptional situations where two people wished they could remain in contact but have no actual means to do so.
I feel as if I am repeating myself, though I do not mean to be an ass. To me this is simply what these words mean.
So I guess, respectfully, I disagree with your disagreement haha.
Yeah you can run a coffee shop and stop doing so without failing, but the way the person described quitting running the shop was failure.
Likewise yes you can absolutely enjoy a temporary relationship, nearly all relationships are temporary (not until death), but a marriage that ends is literally a failed marriage, and a friendship that ends or fizzles out just is less of a friendship than one that persists for a very long time.
I think what it comes down to is some people have a fundamentally different way of thinking about it. Myself included. Setting my intention on something far in the future doesn't necessarily mean I actually intend on achieving it. In fact, I'm almost 100% sure that I won't. Given enough time, I'll be a completely different person. Holding myself to what the younger version of me decided is foolish.
If I end up not being able to financially support a business I started, but I successfully provided for myself with it for years and learned a lot, it's still valuable. If I spend 20 years in a relationship that ends, but it leads to greater self-understanding and helps me build better relationships in the future, it was worth it. It's conceivable that a person could live an entire life doing things that you would classify as failures. But also feel completely satisfied and happy with it. So that suggests it might be a flawed perspective, no?
People change, their learn new things and their wants and objectives change.
I would be wary of considering a failure that somebody who started with the aim of running a coffee shop forever, at some point changed their minds and quit.
It depends on how they quit - if it was good while it lasted and it was their own choice to quit because their hearth wasn't in it anymore or even for hard-nosed business reasons, it doesn't sound like a failure to me. For me a failure would be quiting against one's wishes. In fact I would see the staying running a business you're fed up with against your wishes a failure.
As for relationships, some of the biggest failures I've seen involved people staying in something that had become hellish "for the sake of children", due to money constraints or just for keeping up with appearences, whilst I would consider a successful relationship when people live well together for some years and when they do drift apart do the adult mature thing and separate by mutual agreement, often still being friends afterwards.
Yeah, agreed.
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.