Found here, where the image also has the text as an ALT image description. https://chaos.social/@saxnot/112349120606446433
A flower is only a flower because it falls.
Accepting death isn’t surrender.
It is because everything must end that everything is so beautiful.
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 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.
Not the same philosophy, but also a very useful one. Would go hand in hand with OP
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.
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.
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.
edit - deleting my comment
, i didnt notice which forum.
actual answer is: showerthoughts or something?why not just respond to what you wanted to? everyone else found it an appropriate setting to discuss the content. OP clearly liked it and walked to talk about it anywhere it fits!
When in doubt, [email protected]
Thanks.
If this text doesn’t get replicated on the internet forever, it’s a failure of a meme.
Don’t worry, we’re never gonna give it up.
Trust me. We’re never gonna let you down.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
It fits very well for [email protected] so I cross posted it there
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.
Nice community
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]
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.
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.
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!
It’s pretty cheap to “self publish” your own book. You basically pay printing fees instead of it being covered by the publisher.
