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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.
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I think you are looking into things in a non healthy way.
You are right that success and failure are not binary. Furthermore, every system, be it physical, living, or social, fails sooner or later.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to not fail for as long as possible, for if something brings joy or safety it’s continued success is important. It follows that if something that’s important to someone fails it’s healthy to morn it and to try to learn from it to not repeat the same failure.
I totally disagree with your characterization. I can come up with dozens of examples of how people don’t think that the goal is “forever”. That’s not to say that you’re lying, if you feel it then no doubt your feelings are genuine, but I don’t think your feelings are a good reflection of contemporary society at large.
This.
I would rather have things to end and turn into good memories, rather than having it turn to shit.
Happily Ever After only exists if you happen to die at the happiest moment of your life.
A core Buddhist concept is impermanence, the idea of constant change in our world, and letting go of fixed ideas and outcomes.
Sounds like it was written by someone with shitty parents.
In what way?
Dan Savage (of the sex and relationship advice podcast “Savage Lovecast”) says this frequently.
A short term relationship can also be successful. It doesn’t have to end with one of the partners dying in order to be considered good and worthwhile.
Such a good way to put it. And I have focused on something similar for myself. Literally everything is temporary.
I tend to be a planner, a saver, the person who never uses consumable items in games, and the person who will avoid using an item they like so that it will last longer.
It’s helped me allow myself to enjoy today more, and spend more of my time doing things I want to be doing.
The best definition of success I heard was from Earl Nightingale -
Success is the progressive realization of a worthwhile goal.
Doing something because you want to do it–and it betters yourself, your family, or your community–makes you successful.
Seems to me a logical extension from our capitalist (line must go up) and Christian (stay in line or go to hell) cultural shit pile of a country.
Nah that’s wrong, this is pervasive in every culture and throughout history. Every generation complains about the next because they don’t do the same things the same way as the previous one. Entire countries did this, a kingdom that was less prosperous or lost territory was failing and in decline.
I think the root cause is an innate human fear of change and loss.
Basically yeah, scrolling culture is all about what you’ve done today.
This reminds me of Sand Mandala
Once complete, the sand mandala’s ritualistic dismantling is accompanied by ceremonies and viewing to symbolize Buddhist doctrinal belief in the transitory nature of material life.
On Wikipedia, an article for a deceased person reads, “[The deceased] was,” while an article for a TV show that has ended reads, “The Office is”
Feels kinda related in some way
I mean that does make sense.
The office is still a show that exists and is watchable and all that. It’s not gone. It’s more like it went into retirement.
Devil’s advocate: would you use the present tense for the original Batman, or the original Star Trek?
Take it into the realm of literature, you wouldn’t say The Greats Gatsby was a book (unless you were saying it was a book before it was a movie or something like that), because it continues to be a book even when out of print.
Yes, I would. Nothing wrong with expecting someone might watch them.
Reminds me of last week when everyone was talking about how Bluesky is worthless because it’s just going to go the way of Twitter. And I’m like, Twitter was a good thing for like 15 years.
If Bluesky follows that same pattern, great.
I feel an adjacent thing about Lemmy — The conversations I most value are ones I used to have on Reddit, but dwindled over the years, as Reddit discourse degraded. Something that’s notable is that, on Reddit, the last bastions of meaningful discussion were the little niche subs, indicating that quality of discussion may be inversely correlated with the size of a community.
The federated nature of Lemmy makes it far more resistant to Reddit’s fate, but I still feel a sense of inevitability that there is a timer on how long this can last. (Speaking as an aging punk), it reminds me of what happened to Punk: it went mainstream, and thus less punk. Some people have the instinct of gatekeeping a thing to preserve it, but everything needs fresh blood, and some of the people who discover punk via the mainstream are have a heart as punk as anyone I’ve met — we can’t exclude the masses of “normies” without excluding these people too. In the end, I see that punk is probably dead, but the “true punk spirit” is alive and well, having moved into spaces that were less visible to the mainstream. Similarly, I expect that I’ll always be able to find online clusters of cool nerds to have meaningful conversations with, because even if Lemmy dies a slow death, they will find (or build) a new space.
Ultimately, the inevitable temporariness of Lemmy (and other platforms like Bluesky) is quite a beautiful thing for me, because it forces me to be more mindful of the moment I’m in, and how, despite the world being shit in many ways, here is something that I am really glad I get to be a part of
Leave it to the Internet to be the best (and worst) of all.
I’m at best a poser punk but the diy ethos always rung true. That said one of my favourite places online is a local old school punk forum. It’s niche enough that with its own problems there’s still a community.
In my experience that’s kind of what an online community needs to be. Not exclusive, but niche enough. I too used to be on Reddit, got there when the great Digg migration happened. Those days it was small enough to have have a community on some subreddits. Gradually it got the point that when I’d read the article or had a reasonable thought about the question there were 11000 replies and anything worthwhile was already said.
These days Lemmy feels kinda similar to the old Reddit. Maybe things stay the same or maybe they change and there’ll be another place I log on.
All that said, what OP posted is profound. What you posted is too.
The federated nature of Lemmy makes it far more resistant to Reddit’s fate, but I still feel a sense of inevitability that there is a timer on how long this can last
Hell, the drama right now about the devs running out of funds and people refusing to donate because of their association with .ml might accelerate lemmy’s demise before it can even get big.
That’s beautiful.
I feel like the concern with Bluesky is that Bluesky could enshitify much faster than Twitter, in part because market conditions push for a faster path to profitablity.
Yeah, I won’t claim Twitter was great, but it was widely considered too good (to its users) to be profitable. That was possible during that early investor optimism when the internet was still new, but I also don’t see that happening now anymore.
A social media platform needs to decouple from the typical company structure and democratize its improvement, otherwise investors will necessarily make it as bad as they can without immediately losing all users.
I’m a successful painter. I just only paint once every few years.
