What's Changing? - Acceptance

Please see below selected recent acceptance-related change.

See also:

June 2024

Weltschmerz is the displeasure we feel when the world doesn’t align with our idealided version of it. The word comes to us from the Romantic era, when feelings of melancholy were widespread and even celebrated. We can help ease our weltschmerz by avoiding perfectionism, keeping our negativity bias in check, and volunteering to make the world a better place.

December 2023

Further reading:

April 2023

Maria Popova claimed that it is by erring again and again that we find the shape of the path, by tripping again and again that we learn to walk it. Along the way, the answers emerge not before us but in us. Vincent Van Gogh knew this when he reckoned with how inspired mistakes propel us forward, and the poetic scientist Lewis Thomas knew it when he composed his essay “To Err Is Human,” found in his 1979 collection The Medusa and the Snail.

December 2022

Further reading:

November 2022

Regret is a very common negative emotional experience, driven by thoughts of what might have happened if one had behaved differently in the past. One study of regret found that over the course of about a week, participants reported experiencing regret about nearly a third of decisions they recalled making during that time. Research indicates that, since the late 1980s, people have become less forgiving of their own and others’ mistakes, while also increasingly believing that others will judge them harshly for their lack of perfection. Regret is likely to grow in such an environment. When harnessed skilfully, however, regret can increase the likelihood of psychological growth. Regret can prompt you to reflect on your behaviour, to learn which sorts of behaviour work well and which don’t, according to a writer for Psyche.
Research has shown the potential fallout of perfectionism: anxiety, depression, social aversion, lower life satisfaction, reduced self-worth, and difficulties emotionally self-regulating. The Japanese philosophy of wabi sabi doesn’t just ask us to accept that nothing and no one is perfect; it entreats us to go a step further and find the value of the imperfect.
Daniel H Pink described regret as the “photographic negative” of a good life. Based on wide surveys of regret, he recast it as an indispensable emotion that, provided we don’t wallow in the past, allows us to atone for losses and disappointments, retrace our steps and even try the path not taken.

June 2022

Further reading:
- Feel free to stop striving: learn to relish being an amateur - Psyche Ideas
- How to Live With Less Regret - Psychology Today

July 2021

Why do so many nation states struggle to accommodate minorities? Mahmood Mamdani argued in Neither Settler Nor Native that the colonial “define and rule” attitude towards ethnic or religious minorities lives on in postcolonial states. Such politicisation of identity often leads to extreme violence. Some hope, Mamdani thinks, lies in the post-apartheid South African model.
In his essay collection Alchemical Studies, Carl Jung suggested that life’s greatest problems ‘can never be solved, but only outgrown’.

June 2022

Further reading:
- Feel free to stop striving: learn to relish being an amateur - Psyche Ideas
- How to Live With Less Regret - Psychology Today

March 2021

The School of Life argues that it’s a huge psychological achievement to accept other humans in their bewildering mixture of good and bad, capacity to assist us and to frustrate us, kindness and meanness – and to see that, far more than we’re inclined to imagine, most people belong in that slightly sobering, slightly hopeful grey area that goes by the term ‘good enough.’ To cope with the conflict between hope and reality, our culture should teach us good integration skills, prompting us to accept with a little more grace what is imperfect in ourselves – and then, by extension, in others.

August 2020

Maria Popova noted that, reflecting on the timeless wisdom of the Greek myths and tragedies, particularly Euripides’s Hecuba, Martha Nussbaum considered the essence of good personhood as necessitating accepting the basic insecurity of existence and embracing uncertainty. The paradox of the human condition, Nussbaum reminds us, is that while our capacity for vulnerability and, by extension, our ability to trust others, may be what allows for tragedy to befall us, the greatest tragedy of all is the attempt to guard against hurt by petrifying that essential softness of the soul, for that denies our basic humanity, adds Popova.

May 2019

It’s normal enough to hold out for all that we want. Why would we celebrate hobbling, when we wish to run? Why accept friendship, when we crave passion? But if we reach the end of the day and no one has died, no further limbs have broken, a few lines have been written and one or two encouraging and pleasant things have been said, then that is already an achievement worthy of a place at the altar of sanity, argues The School of Life.

March 2019

Harvard Business Review noted that we can find ourselves endlessly mentally replaying situations in which we wish we had performed differently. Overthinking in this way is called rumination. While we worry about what might occur in the future, we ruminate about events that have already happened. A ruminative reaction to an event often triggers memories of similar situations from the past and an unproductive focus on the gap between the real and ideal self. Prompted by this one event, we begin to chastise ourselves for not being more of something…organised, ambitious, smart, disciplined, or charismatic. Rumination isn’t just unpleasant. It’s closely linked to poor problem-solving, anxiety, and depression.

February 2019

Complaining carries such negative connotations. claimed The School of Life. Yet so many of our critical thoughts are legitimate, but they are let down by their method of delivery: we nag, we harangue, we attack, we rant, we make cutting, sarcastic remarks, all of which make our partner deny and escape rather than investigate how they might learn. Yet complaining is a skill, if we can lace our criticism with reassurance and explain what is genuinely at stake.

January 2019

Further reading:
- Allow yourself to embrace ‘Jomo’ — the joy of missing out - FT

October 2018

When we are furious, paranoid, weak-willed or sad, Stoicism is on hand – as it has been for 2,000 years, to nurse us with wisdom and friendship, argued The School of Life. We must always try to picture the worst that could happen - and then remind ourselves that the worst is survivable. The goal is not to imagine that bad things don’t unfold; it’s to see that we are far stronger than we think.
Indeed, for the TSOL, our single most important move is acceptance. There is no need - on top of everything else - to be anxious that we are anxious. Mood is no sign that our lives have gone wrong, merely that we are alive. A calm life isn’t one that’s always perfectly serene. It is one where we are committed to calming down more readily, where we strive for more realistic expectations; where we can understand better why certain problems are occurring, we can be adept at finding a consoling perspective. The progress is limited and imperfect, but genuine.

September 2018

Fulfill your dreams and make the most of your life! So advocate headmasters, moralists and revolutionaries. Yet poet John Betjeman's principal regret was that he did not have more sex. Is life not about goals and ambition but about the moment of being? Or is making our dreams real the only way to fulfillment, asked the Institute for Ideas?
People often see only what they want to see, rather than considering circumstances, especially those that can not be changed, as satisfactory. However, some minority groups describe their goal as "acceptance", meaning that the majority will not challenge the minority's full participation in society.

August 2018

Notions of acceptance are prominent in many faiths and meditation practices. For example, Buddhism's first noble truth, "life is suffering", invites people to accept that suffering is a natural part of life.
However, the world is made up of givers and takers, and the takers lose every time,’ according to Ellen Langer, psychology professor at Harvard. When you give - a gift, a compliment, an offer of help - you can feel generous, competent, connected, empowered, in control. At the other end of the spectrum, in the receiving position, some of us may feel needy, incompetent, weakened, exposed, vulnerable. ‘You may fear showing need, and feel wary of accepting something on someone else’s terms,’ says Langer, author of Counter Clockwise. Are we relinquishing control and accepting some kind of quid pro quo? What are we committing to?’
Yet accepting does not necessarily mean 'liking,' 'enjoying,' or 'condoning.' One can accept what is-and be determined to evolve from there. It is not acceptance but denial that leaves people stuck, according to Nathaniel Branden, an American psychologist. Sometimes people can only learn what really matters in extremis. Erica Jong, author of Fear of Flying, believes the key is to accept fear as a part of life - specifically the fear of change – and claims that she went ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.
This phenomenon was reflected in How the light gets in, a 2011 article in Ode Magazine, which argued that while we think of fear as an obstacle to action, it’s just the opposite: fear alerts us to threat and impels us to act to preserve life. In consciously befriending fear and accepting the sense of vulnerability that comes with it, we expand our capacity for joy.
In Chasing Daylight, the posthumously-published memoir of former KPMG CEO Eugene O’Kelly, recounting the three-and-a-half months between his diagnosis with brain cancer and his death in 2005, O’Kelly describes how he felt tempted to get angry when a radiation machine broke and patients had to wait in long lines, but he didn’t have enough time to waste it in anger, so instead he began to learn acceptance.
Once the five basic needs listed below are met, further affluence and accumulation of goods do not necessarily seem to correlate with a higher quality of life, according to the Worldwatch Institute.
Labelling theory (also known as social reaction theory) was developed by sociologist Howard Becker. It focuses on the linguistic tendency of majorities to negatively label minorities or those seen as deviant from norms.

Topics

Levels

Timelines

Spaces