Last week the technology community was saddened by news of the apparent suicide of Diaspora developer Ilya Zhitomirskiy. He was 22 years old.

In response to the news, developer/entrepreneur Joshua Ellis wrote:

It’s been reported that Diaspora co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy committed suicide this week at 22 years of age; while no one is sure of the cause, of course, there has been a lot of speculation that Diaspora’s lack of traction might have been a trigger.

I certainly hope not. I wish he hadn’t done it in the first place, of course; I wish I could have talked to the guy. I wish I could have told him that there’s very little you can do at the age of 22 that’s not undoable, short of killing someone or having a kid; no matter how bleak your situation seems, you can always change it. More than that, though, I wish I could have told him: dude, it’s just a fucking social network. It doesn’t matter.

I think a lot of us lose perspective working in this industry. There’s a lot of hyperbolic and impossibly hypocritical rhetoric thrown around by tech founders and venture capitalists. The words “world-changing” and “revolutionary” get thrown around a lot, and it’s mostly at projects and products that don’t deserve these adjectives.

Ellis is no stranger to disappointment. Ellis worked for Mperia, an unsuccessful predecessor of Bandcamp that was before its time. He also tried, apparently unsuccessfully, to raise funds on Indie GoGo to build an open source, self-hosted alternative to Bandcamp. Now he has his own startup, Stikki, which I included in my round-up to geolocation APIs.

He wrote:

It sucked when they tanked. But you know what you learn, when you don’t kill yourself at 22 because your idea isn’t getting enough attention and it looks like you might not be the visionary you thought you were? You learn that failure is inevitable. And you learn that you simply brush yourself off, go “Oh, okay, that didn’t work,” and look to see what collateral you can salvage out of the thing that didn’t work. Sometimes you’ll find you’ve invented a new technology that might be useful in totally different ways than you originally considered; sometimes you’ll find you learned a new skill; more often than not, you’ll simply walk away with more experience about how the world works, and how it doesn’t.

I’m building my own little sandbox on the Internet right now, and I’m old enough and wise enough not to have any illusions about its potential to change the world or make me a millionaire. I know the odds are against it…the way they are against any startup. If it fails? That sucks, and I’m going to do everything to keep it from happening, but if it does, I’ll just move on to the next idea. I’m never short of ideas.

It’s a sobering reminder that, with a few noteworthy exceptions, the companies we build are, as Ellis puts it, incremental improvements, not revolutions. And as much as most founders hate to admit it, whatever idea they’re working on, someone else will probably come along and do it if they don’t.

I’m not going to say that your company doesn’t matter. Of course it matters. But just like no company is worth killing yourself for, most companies aren’t worth missing out on the important parts of your life for.

If everything goes according to plan, this article should be posted on Thanksgiving in the U.S. I’m writing it the night before. It’s a good day to stop and think about what’s really important.

Zhitomirskiy’s death is a tragedy, but I hope we can all use it as a reminder that our lives our short and to remember the important things in our lives, other than work. Because companies come and go – especially these days. Our families, friends and community – these should be our constants, these are what we fall back on when failure strikes. Remember that, and don’t forget to be present.