🫧 Success & Longevity

A wee lil’ bit of musing around Helen Bright’s (brightwanderer @ tumblr) reflections on success and longevity.

[Journal Archives: #20220427]

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.

I 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.

~ Helen Bright via Tumblr

I've always been super comfortable with experiencing inner journeys in flux but not with career / employment / job / earned income (until truly this year - 2022). I'm the only one within my social circles who does not stick to a company for more than 1.5 years.

I used to seek my "forever career" because sense of identity and self-worth was so bonded to that pillar of life, but have quite recently eased into not taking myself too seriously in ways of receiving monetary resources. Every step happens for a reason for my personal journey in life. Now that I have better (validated) understanding and acceptance of how I flow, bye 'sunk cost fallacy'!

Read about my career / employee years in my 20s: