I think we have a cultural tendency to think of success along the lines of achievement and status. we look for the indicators of success as being flashy titles, cushy salaries, awards and accolades, material luxuries, and social status (we also have a tendency to tie success to one's career, which doesn't need to be the case). These things are superficial indicators of privilege and power, however, and may not actually be linked to a successful life.
I'm more of the mindset that to be successful is to do with your life that which you feel you were meant to do, a sense of having achieved with your efforts the thing which you felt was most important for you to achieve. This can look a lot of ways, but broadly I would say that it looks like integrating your passions, competencies, capabilities, and broader lifestyle in a way that supports the pursuit of your goalsāwhether your goals are professional, personal, artistic, spiritual, whatever. And if you've really done this, positioned yourself such that you wake up each morning with a purpose or a sense of being on the path towards purpose, then getting there will feel as good as you hoped.
Now if you get to this point which you envisioned would be the landmark of having reached success and it doesn't feel like you're dedicating your efforts meaningfully towards something which brings you flourishing, then maybe this isn't your success. Does that mean you've failed? Not necessarily, it just means you're still on the path to finding your success, and that journey and that struggle can be rewarding in and of themselves. Don't pin your success to looking a certain way, don't limit yourself to only having one modality for achieving success, and don't be afraid to move your target if it's not serving you. Get to that point of being able to pour your whole self into something and you're gonna feel great.
Jan 14, 2025
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We have to feel it. It sucks. But if you donāt, I think itās much harder to define success. This also makes it harder to define who you are and hope to be. This isnāt a super helpful answer.
But Iāve failed a lot. Some of failure is out of our hands, some is not. Either way knowing how it feels is helpful to developing your sense of self.
Mar 31, 2025
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To be upfront, there are two things about myself that I love:
1. I'm tenacious AF
2. I am generally a positive person. I can handle almost any situtation, and I've had to learn to actually ask/demand more, so it's not always great.
With that being said, I've wanted to die many times. I've experienced a lot of trauma. I have PTSD for years. Things got to a point where I knew if I didn't make really drastic changes I was going to die in some way- I simply could not go on how I was.
The only thing that started to change things is when I started to learn more about myself and my reasons for doing things, being with certain people, getting into certain relationships. Part of my whole issue was that I had major trauma from childhood that I was actively avoiding. So many things happen to us as children, big and small, that we don't have the capacticy to deal with at the time. But as adults, we do.
I remember the moment where things started shifting for me. It unlocked a hunger in me to dig more and more to why I was the way I was, and why I made the choices I did, in a really deep way. I became more action oriented in facing my shit, healing it, and discovering what I was like without it. It definitely wasn't easy, and it wasn't fun most of the time, but in reality the years I spent doing that are small compared to the life I have ahead of me. I'm a whole new person, but the parts of me that are true are the same. I became a more mature, loving, responsible version of myself.
Hating your life is a sign something is not working. If you're unsure what that is, go inward. If you don't know where to start, think about the very next step. That's all you need to do. You're never locked in where you're at now forever. Don't know what you want to do for a career? Switch gears and do a completely different job. There is no timeline. You can literally do whatever you want. When I was doing a lot of the stressful inner work, I worked at animal shelters because I needed something so low stress. And I was mid 20's!!! No career goals in sight!!! Not even anywhere in my brain!!! If you're straight up hating something that is taking up most of your time... just quit it. Life is too short.
Success to me is ease and grace. I want a peaceful, joyful life (most of the time). Sometimes to figure out what you need to do, you gotta take a giant step back. Or a step to the left. Or take a big roundabout. Or maybe a quest needs to be taken...
Dec 4, 2024
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Iām in this process right now, and I was feeling really down the other day about comparing myself to my friends, especially financially. I fell into these ideas about being over or under six figures and whether that actually says anything about me as a person. I got sad about being the lowest paid person in my group and if my friends should be friends with me. And my closest sister is a whole ass medical doctor too. What am I doing with my life??
But then my oldest sister sent a sc of a text she got about how great she is at her job, and she said sheās thriving and loves what she does. And she does *not* make money. Money helps for sure, and itās nice to have a fancy title (people would always be so impressed when I dropped the word āneuroscienceā and now I feel so awkward talking about it in the past tense, like will they judge me if they think I just couldnāt hack it?) but itās really important to truly understand what success means to *you*.
I think pivoting to occupational therapy will be really good for my personality and skill sets, and itās also directly impactful on peopleās lives. Iāll make enough for sure, but not as much as my one sister or some of my friends, but thatās not the point. It just matters if Iām doing a good job and having an impact. If Iām doing well and doing good, then Iām doing fine. š
Jun 9, 2025
Top Recs from @royallmonarch
Jun 2, 2025
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I consume a lot of music regularly, and a huge part of keeping a fresh diet of new listens going is having enough sources of recommendations that arenāt an algorithm that either 1) reinforces your existing listening patterns, keeping you stagnant in your tastes, or 2) platforms whoever paid enough to push their product to the top, serving you something that may not inherently be of inferior quality, but may not align with your tastes, may not be exciting beyond just being a new release, and realigns your current listening habits to be more in line with what the average user on the platform is also listening to ā which socially might have benefits but which creates a homogeneity of consumption that can become bland since youāre listening to something really just because itās the next product on the assembly line to have its public moment and not because anything about the music actually captured your attention. the current landscape of streaming is designed to keep you at an all you can eat buffet where you take whatās served to you, and as a result a lot of us have forgotten how to look at a menu and order.
so what does taking a more active role in your own music curation look like? for me, itās meant not using streaming as a primary listening platform. I mostly use my local Apple Music library on my phone that I curate with the vestigial iTunes Library framework thatās still a part of Apple Music on my laptop. probably going to find an alternative soon since apple seems to be cutting integration progressively. I like this method because it forces me to choose what to sync to the limited storage space I have, forcing me to take inventory of what I actually listen to and what I can offload. the files I get are mostly from Bandcamp or Soulseek depending on whether itās available for purchase or entirely unavailable online (as is the case for a lot of electronic music that was on vinyl only, which is where soulseek comes in clutch). I also have freedom here to change the ID3 tags to better sort and organize, rate, change track info, and track my own listening data.
Bandcamp and other music purchasing platforms are great because 1) it reshapes my relationship to music away from consumerism and back towards curation. I have to pay actual money for this thing now if I want to use it, so iām forced to consider its value (usually iāll stream a release first to gauge my interest). 2) having to spend money helps me to course out my meals so to speak, as iāll buy a few releases iāve accumulated in my cart over the month and cash out on Bandcamp Friday when 100% of my money is actually getting to the artist (TOMORROW IS BANDCAMP FRIDAY BTW!!!), and between purchases I can actually chew and savor and digest my last orders, they donāt get swept up in the deluge of new releases. my plate is full until iām done and then I order more. also for the times of the year like now when new music isnāt coming out as regularly I take time to find older music that I would normally overlook while keeping up with new drops. currently very into early 80s/late 70s music with early digital production, kinda stuff that would evolve into synthpop and dance music.
so how do you know what to order? for me, Iām getting recs through trusted curation platforms. whether itās bandcamp daily, yāall lovely folks here on PI.FYI, friends, or most importantly musicians who I follow on socials that share their tastes through posts, stories, playlists on steaming, interviews, etc. I like this last one especially because itās kind of like a musical game of telephone. if I like an artist and they share their interests and influences itās like every layer in this process is stretching my palate further from the sound that I was originally interested in and into a new territory that has some shared DNA but would never have been recommended to me by an algo because thereās no shared category or label between them, only the musical influence and interpretation of it made by the artist. as an example, I was a huge Skrillex stan, he signed KOAN Sound to his label, they collab with Asa who collabs with Sorrow, Sorrow takes huge influence from Burial, Burial makes some ambient adjacent stuff and takes huge influence from 90s rave music and drum and bass and 2000s rnb, now iām listening to Brandy - All in Me, William Basinski, Aphex Twin, none on whom would get recommended by Spotify to me from Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites.
LAST thing iāll say ā because in yappin about this iām realizing how actually passionate about this subject I am: MAKE LISTS! playlists are cool, but they can flatten your music into vague categories of āvibesā and āaestheticsā and encourage picking one-off songs from artists that you never form an active audience relationship with. I make a practice of making my own year end lists of top 25 albums (plus some honorable recs and top individual songs) and keeping them in a notes doc that I regularly update and rearrange over the course of the year. this forces me to consider the actual relationship iām forming with what iāve ordered for myself. did I like it in the moment but it didnāt have staying power? is it slowly growing on me? it also encourages taking albums as a whole. maybe I liked one or two tracks a lot but the rest wasn't resonating. thatās ok! maybe I rank it lower but now iāve actually taken time to consider it, itās in my library, and maybe (quite a few cases for me) something I ranked like bottom 5 albums becomes a retroactive favorite from that year as my tastes evolve. also 25 albums to take with me from each year is really more than you'd think, i struggle sometimes to even find 25 that I formed a true connection with. I think the biggest thing the itunes era ruined that led into now is the single-ification of music, the ability to separate the hits from the deep cuts. albums are meant to be taken as a whole, and then once you've really sat with the whole you can find what actually stuck. even then I like to keep the whole around because soooo often iāll write off a track that yeeeears later I come to love. trust the artist, they made it like they did for a reason.
aaannyyyywayy TLDR: get recs organically, be more active in deciding your listening patterns, fr*cken pay artists yall, trust the artist embrace the album, really consider what you consume
Feb 29, 2024
Jun 4, 2025