SOURCE - https://brightwanderer.tumblr.com/post/681806049845608448
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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.
We also don't need to see failure as a wholly bad thing. If your hypothetical business closes down because you couldn't afford to keep it open, it DID fail, but if it ended up making your mental health better to not have all that stress, then it lead to a good thing.
Maybe I'm too realist and literal.