The problem is not that you're negative, it's that you're unwilling to see the potential of learning from other people's mistakes. Just shutting yourself off from the prospect and consequences of failure does not automatically make you immune to those mistakes. Smart people fail every day, and sometimes those failures are personal disasters. It's a good idea to remind yourself what's at stake sometimes.

Winning the startup lottery is also a cliche, but I don't see anyone complaining when random successful people relate their accounts (some of which could not possibly translate to anyone else).

This isn't about anyone's mistakes, it's about the emotional scenery surrounding some generic failure. What is there to learn? That completely devoting one's self to a single project requires sacrifice? That betting your emotional life on that project means, uh, risking your emotional life? If the point of this is to remind me that catastrophic failure is catastrophic then it can easily be edited to a single sentence.

Your latter argument just doesn't make any sense. The fact that I haven't happened to read and respond similarly to a banal description of how it feels to succeed isn't evidence of anything.

It's not generic failure, it's very specific - it's an accurate description of a failure scenario that affects many startup founders. In a lot of cases, these sacrifices happen creepingly and gradually. The lesson in this case is recognizing the signs of overcommitment and a preview of what failure can look like. Apparently, you didn't need this lesson, and that's totally fine. I for my part would have considered myself very fortunate if somebody had given me this kind of preview before everything actually turned to shit.

You complain about banality, and maybe that's an accurate label. Anything that doesn't concern or engage you could be considered banal. Maybe life is largely banal, in hindsight at least.

>It's not generic failure, it's very specific - it's an accurate description of a failure scenario that affects many startup founders.

You just described "generic failure". If it happens to many startups, its generic to startups, which was the point. There's nothing here to learn except it sucks to fail. Which anyone that's ever done anything in life is already aware of.

"So what? Where's the value?"

What's the value in art?

Sure, from the above it sounds like you think it's silly to call this art, you certainly don't like it. But it's a small piece written by someone for a single purpose, to illicit an emotional response. Whether you consider it good or not it certainly doesn't mean it's not art.

And in the end I'm sure plenty of people identified with it and responded in the way the author intended. No, it doesn't provide any major insight but it probably provided some value to some people. And just because it didn't for you doesn't justify knocking it down as worthless, at least that's how I've come to view any art I don't necessarily enjoy.

So what? I enjoyed reading it, that's what.

It's always nice to know that you're not the only one who felt this way.

I thought the same regarding cliche. The themes are too obvious to me: head in hands, lost girlfriend, lingering last look. They're all listed in TV tropes somewhere.

That being said, I'm the guy who cringes when someone sings about their love being like the moon, stars and sun. There are many people out there who aren't as overly sensitive to cliched writing as me. I think it has value for anyone who felt something while reading it, and it looks like many people in the thread did.

I feel a faint shudder of foreboding while reading it, but I think it was the image at the top of the article that caused it. Very desolate.