SOURCE - https://brightwanderer.tumblr.com/post/681806049845608448

Alt-text:
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.

  • TimewornTraveler@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    4 days ago

    you raise an interesting discussion, but isn’t being remembered as a legend just another form of permanence? every example you provided is of someone viewed as a “success” in their field, someone remembered.

    I would discourage you from discouraging others from examining the way our culture relates to mortality, because that’s what all of this is about: death anxiety.

    • exasperation@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      I’m basically saying two things.

      1. Permanence isn’t required or expected, although in some instances permanence is valued, in defining success.
      2. Permanence itself does not require continuing effort. One can leave a permanent mark on something without active maintenance.

      Taken together, success doesn’t require permanence, and permanence doesn’t require continued effort. The screenshot text is wrong to presume that our culture only values permanence, and is wrong in its implicit argument that permanence requires continued effort.