Found here, where the image also has the text as an ALT image description. https://chaos.social/@saxnot/112349120606446433
If this text doesn’t get replicated on the internet forever, it’s a failure of a meme.
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.
What a bloody great comment.
And yes, what matters is the discourse (the ideas within the text), not the utterance used to convey said discourse (the words on the screen).
Classically, the meme would be the semantic content in this context or a derivative one (unless we consider this text itself to be derivative). It might re-emerge periodically, but some degree of contextual integrity would be necessary for it to be considered the same meme.
Don’t worry, we’re never gonna give it up.
Trust me. We’re never gonna let you down.
The main thesis here is good, but that’s a mischaracterization of what people consider “failed” writers.
Someone who wrote one novel and had it published is not considered a failed writer, no matter if they then stop writing immediately. “Failed writer” is pretty much reserved for people who tried writing and couldn’t get anyone interested enough in it to publish it.
I’m not sure what labels would be applied to someone who exclusively pursued self-publishing, but that’s not really the common way.
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
That’s who I was thinking of when I wrote this!
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.
If you close a business without going bankrupt, that is not failure.
Sounds like a crazy idea to me. Next you’ll be saying, end a TV show before the ratings have plummeted to zero.
Best to end it while you are still “Master of your Domain”.
> climb the ranks of the navy
> become “Admiral and Master of the Fourth Sea”
> end it with a splash, a crack, a gurgle, and a “Captain goes down with his ship!”…
> BBC pulls in a new actor for your role and carries on two seasons more before abruptly stopping and still doesn’t resolve your storyline.
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
Curated tumblr, microblog memes, Lemmy being wholesome, 196, lots of places it could fit and be appreciated.
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: [email protected]
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!
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.
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.
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
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 ;)
So then why did you get married at all? Fun? Taxes?
I married my partner for many reasons, financial, wanting to raise a child together, wanting to share my life with them…
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Entirely fair question and thanks for expanding, bit personal for online nobodys like us. Sorry if I came off as accusitory.
So your partner is contractually obligated to stay with you of course!
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 "?
I think this is looking at it backwards. I think we shouldn’t view failure as a bad thing. Failure is learning. It’s part of growing. You fail at something, you’ve learned something (well, hopefully). Often you learn more by failing than by succeeding.
Like coaching my kid’s soccer team today: I want them to fail sometimes. I have a player doing well with his right foot and scores a couple of goals, I switch him to the other side and tell him to use his left foot “But I’m not good at it!” good. “I’m not good at goalie.” Excellent, here’s the goalie jersey and go get in there. That’s the point, I’m trying to make them better soccer players. If we just played into their strengths all the time, it would limit how much of a better player they can become.
At work, as a programmer, I try something out. It doesn’t work out because there was some unforeseen condition that causes my initial pattern to fail? No big deal, just redo the pattern from scratch (if, of course, there is the time for that) or rethink the pattern. And I’ve seen how often that solves some other problem, or makes another thing more efficient, or makes future development more easy.
So who cares if your coffee shop failed, or you’re a “failed writer” (I’ve never heard that before), if we don’t treat failure as a bad thing, then people will be more likely to accept that and learn from it.
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.
Disregarding the question but commenting on the material, I don’t think this is generally true. In labeling something as forever upfront (e.g., marriage, which generally includes a “forever clause”), it’s only natural though.
Contrast marriage with a “summer fling” — the expectation is a duration of at most one summer. Not really considered a failure (which is kinda the plot of Grease, dated though that may be…)
There was a great restaurant near me (Michelin star), and it closed a while back — the owner was upfront that he just had a kid and wanted to spend more time together. I don’t think anyone views that as a failure. A loss for the community, definitely, but not a failure.
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.
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: [email protected], [email protected]
It fits very well for [email protected] so I cross posted it there
Nice community
I only see 3 posts in that community. Is it just me?
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.
Yeah, with that logic, life is no good because it ends.
and thank god it does!
No, I want to live for centuries at least!
I’m glad life ends but I’d rather have a few more centuries before it does! The two ideas are not mutually exclusive
centuries? do you realise how long those are?
I just created [email protected] in case you wanna just post the text instead of picture, because I’m perhaps irrationally annoyed by pictures of text.
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.
Normally I’d expect to see this stuff on [email protected]
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!
