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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.
This is nice ways of saying you can change perspective on things by using more appropriate words. At no point do your viewpoints clash with op. But success and failure can certainly be binary if you want. They are words and mean different things for different people, and we hope to sometimes communicate a specific point and sometimes a philosophical one. It can be used for much. Failure as a word is useful but also touchy for a lot of modern achievers, or sofa enjoyers. It can be oh so binary for some people. Like, did you vote and try to prevent the faschist uprising that will ruin your life? It's a yes or no and one of those are very much a failure. If you don't want to see your failures you will become like the wounded manchildren that has need to use power and assert dominance to exist. At that point there's not much left of the reflection you wrote about. It's an antithesis for the practice.