Sunrise, Sunset

Everything begins, and everything ends.  Sometimes the beginnings are hard to define, and the endings are hard to accept.  Other times the beginnings are clear, and the endings are welcome.

We have a lot of beginnings and endings in our lives.  Beginnings are usually easier than endings.  In fact, some of us dislike endings so much that we avoid them by any means possible.  How many projects have you started, and then let fade from attention, denying them a proper finish?  I’ve done that so many times, I should be ashamed.

This is so common to our industry, though.  Plenty of projects and even programming languages get launched, gain favor, start a buzz, and then gradually fall by the wayside, but they never really end.  There are still people making a living writing COBOL.  There are so few of them left, in fact, they’re probably making a better living than you and me.  COBOL will only die when the last machine shuts down, or else when the last COBOL programmer does.

We see the same dynamics at play in design.  Remember drop shadows?  Some day, we’ll say the same thing about flat design, even responsive design as we now understand it.  Something will build from them, whether as a reaction or an evolution, be given a snappy new name (snappy names are critical to the adoption of design trends), and we’ll look back and say, “Remember…?”

But there is no standard definition of what constitutes the end of a trend.  It’s probably just as well, since in the absence of such a definition, we can support a thriving industry of thinkpieces on The Death Of whatever the thinkpiecer wants to declare dead.  They’re never definitive, but they do generate traffic, which generates ad revenue, which generates higher stock prices for Google.

That is, until some confluence of factors causes Google’s stock to drop, which will in turn launch a thousand breathless thinkpieces on The Death of Google.  They’ll sail off toward the intellectual horizon, questionable axioms and unquestioned assumptions fluttering gaily in the hot air, following in the wakes of the fleets of thinkpieces on The Death of Apple, The Death of Microsoft, The Death of Dell, The Death of IBM, The Death of Kodak, and The Death of Digital Equipment Corporation.

If you live long enough, you start to get a sense that it’s all just a little bit of history repeating, as Shirley Bassey once put it.  The towering crises of youth, both the personal and global, are eventually seen to be iterations on a long-running theme.  When our elders say that youth is wasted on the young, a big part of that observation is the realization that the time of life at which you are the most energetic is also the time in which you’re most likely to expend all that energy taking everything so damn seriously, as if the world is coming to an end.

Which it will, at some point.  Everything does.

The best we can hope for is that an ending comes at the right time, for the right reasons.  We don’t always have the ability to make that happen.  Other times, we do.

Here’s to the last year of The Pastry Box.

This article was originally published at The Pastry Box Project on 2 January 2015.

• Sunrise, Sunset was published on Friday, January 2nd, 2015.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, Tech, and Writing categories.
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