Heavybell ,
@Heavybell@lemmy.world avatar

I'm okay with most of this, but don't want to see this logic universally applied. For example, I think art should be preserved, and that includes games. Consigning years of work from dozens to hundreds of people to the void because the publisher got tired of it absolutely should be considered a monumental failure.

rsuri ,

I just created !justtext in case you wanna just post the text instead of picture, because I'm perhaps irrationally annoyed by pictures of text.

piyuv ,

When you’re marrying someone you’re usually not like “lets try this and see where it goes” (that’s called dating), you’re more like “till death do us part” so yes, divorce is failure more often than not. Ending a relationship, not so much

laughingsquirrel ,

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 ;)

FunnyUsername ,
@FunnyUsername@lemmy.world avatar

So then why did you get married at all? Fun? Taxes?

trainden ,

I married my partner for many reasons, financial, wanting to raise a child together, wanting to share my life with them...

FunnyUsername ,
@FunnyUsername@lemmy.world avatar

None of those reasons require marriage, so it's not a satisfying reason. I want to know why MARRIAGE, specifically? Just checking it off a bucket list perhaps?

Wereduck ,

It seems to me that all of the reasons they provides are all reasons to get married. Especially raising a child, given the privileges that are afforded to married parents in a lot of places (especially in the case of adoption, or IVF using a stranger's genetic material). Something doesn't have to require marriage for the benefits of it to outweigh the cons for a specific situation.

The question seems to me to be kind of confusing. What alternative are you comparing it to? Some sort of local structure like domestic partnership?

FunnyUsername ,
@FunnyUsername@lemmy.world avatar

The post I'm replying to was acting as if they had some new wisdom from being polyamorous and their perspective on marriage. But it sounds like they're just using it as a business move which is something a lot of non polyamorous people do as well, and nothing new. I wasn't asking what reasons could possibly exist to get married outside of romance or whatever you're talking about, I was asking SPECIFICALLY THEM why they bothered, with their "unique" perspective on relationships. But it seems the only actual reason they have is taxes, despite their diatribe.

Ultragigagigantic ,
@Ultragigagigantic@lemmy.world avatar

So your partner is contractually obligated to stay with you of course!

Bahnd ,

Taxes alone is a valid reason. So long as there are social, financial and legal benifits to the institution then there is no argument to have. If you feel that love or religion is a requirment that I feel your concept of marraige is outdated.

FunnyUsername ,
@FunnyUsername@lemmy.world avatar

No, you are a misunderstanding me. The post I'm replying to was acting as if they had some new wisdom from being polyamorous and their perspective on marriage. But it sounds like they're just using it as a business move which is something a lot of non polyamorous people do as well, and nothing new. I wasn't asking what reasons could possibly exist to get married outside of romance or whatever you're talking about, I was asking SPECIFICALLY THEM why they bothered. But it seems the only actual reason they have is taxes, despite their diatribe.

Bahnd ,

Entirely fair question and thanks for expanding, bit personal for online nobodys like us. Sorry if I came off as accusitory.

seejur ,

In a lot of animal species, relationships are lifelong. For most of their history, humans had life long marriages in all corners of the world. Why are you calling it "a crazy concept "?

hark ,
@hark@lemmy.world avatar

Success or failure depends on the goal. Perhaps outside observers can see something as a failure or success, but that doesn't matter since you set the goals. As for which Lemmy community to post this to, I dunno.

sp3tr4l ,

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.

chumbalumber ,

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.

sp3tr4l ,

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.

Drewelite ,

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?

Aceticon , (edited )

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.

chumbalumber ,

Yeah, agreed.

AnarchistArtificer , (edited )

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.

gmtom ,
@gmtom@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Emmie , (edited )

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.

kemsat ,

Yeah, with that logic, life is no good because it ends.

stebo02 ,
@stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

and thank god it does!

Valmond ,

No, I want to live for centuries at least!

AlolanYoda ,

I'm glad life ends but I'd rather have a few more centuries before it does! The two ideas are not mutually exclusive

stebo02 ,
@stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

centuries? do you realise how long those are?

TimewornTraveler , (edited )

Very interesting sentiments, very agreeable, but if this were one of my patients I would be quick to redirect the conversation away from "society is wrong" into "You're realizing that you believe this is your path". Generalizations like that do us no good. If it's about YOU, then make it about YOU. If someone is dismissing YOU based on this stuff, talk about how that person's words affect YOU.

I bet $100 that this person recently had a conversation with someone where this kind of language was used. Or, maybe more likely, they saw some random irrelevant bullshit on the internet from a stranger and extrapolated messages about an entire culture from it. The culture is YOU TOO, buddy!

Mr_Dr_Oink ,

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.

fulcrummed ,

It is because everything must end that everything is so beautiful.

db0 ,
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

It fits very well for !eudaimonia so I cross posted it there

Blaze ,
@Blaze@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Nice community

uninvitedguest ,
@uninvitedguest@lemmy.ca avatar

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

ThePowerOfGeek ,

No, you are correct about the number of posts. But it looks like the community is only about 2 weeks old. And if they focus on quality over quantity that post count isn't a bad thing.

Ilovethebomb ,

The best way to get out of a business is generally to sell it though, so someone else keeps running it. Although shutting down a business for personal reasons isn't generally considered a failure.

As for being an author, you only need one book to be a commercial success in order to be a "successful" author.

Kovukono ,

Normally I'd expect to see this stuff on !curatedtumblr

Cheskaz ,

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!

GluWu ,

Curated tumblr, microblog memes, Lemmy being wholesome, 196, lots of places it could fit and be appreciated.

Nimrod ,

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

Not on topic, but wow.

threelonmusketeers ,

And if all else fails: !nowhereelsetoshare

PhreakyByNature ,

I've been a low ranked, terrible Counter-Strike player since 2000. Probably will be until my fingers /eyes / ears stop working. That's not success. But it is fun. Some stuff you can do "forever" and it be fun. Conversely the point in your post is important.

Alexstarfire ,

Really depends on what your goals were to begin with. Most people don't open a business or get married expecting for them to end. In that regard, they are failures.

all-knight-party ,
@all-knight-party@kbin.run avatar

That's what the post is trying to highlight, that people don't allow themselves to view something retroactively as the good it had, only the negative, as if the end failure is all they got out of it.

Damaskox ,
@Damaskox@lemmy.world avatar

I think I'm gonna disagree with the fandom dying thing.

From a system's perspective - if it exist for a reason, for someone to use it, and then they stop using it and go away, leaving it alone without any use, I'd see that system being abandoned, lost, or dead.

Then again - someone can come back to it and turn it "alive" or active again!

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