3 ms·
It surely is acceptance, but how do you convince yourself of it? How do you convince a young college student, a just-out-of college late 20's (me), a about-to-h
by NalNezumi 6y ago
It surely is acceptance, but how do you convince yourself of it? How do you convince a young college student, a just-out-of college late 20's (me), a about-to-hit-midlife late 30's/40's person that is struggling to reach the expectation they have put?
Tell a college kid to lower his expectation and he will feel like a "unmotivated" person, tell a 30's/40's that and he will feel like a failure, all his struggle for nothing, and tell a late 20's to lower his expectation and that goes against every self-motivation influencer and (probably) what his surrounding successful peers suggest.
I think most people understand that the answer is acceptance, but how to reach that point, is so different for each person. Because some people overcome it by sheer grit, while some through therapists, it's hard for a person in the grind to realize what course of action is the best, and before it's too late.
- Jeff_Brown 6y agoYMMV but for me, simply talking to lots of people about their lifestyles, expectations and goals helped me feel a lot better about my own. That might sound obvious, but it's really easy to maintain a large set of relationships without ever talking about those things. Politics, science, arts, sports, etc. are so easy to fill a conversation with that it's a common pitfall to hardly ever broach the subject of who we are and what we're doing.
- teekert 6y agoIt maybe difficult to change your expectations of life, maybe we should be asking, why do have these high expectations in the first place?
- zoozla 6y agoAcceptance is a bit of a misleading term. We can't directly accept anything, especially if we're trying to force it, because we'll be fighting against not being able to accept the fact that we aren't accepting our circumstances. It's quite recursive.
- teorema 6y agoI think part of it for me is this underlying anger. Despite these kinds of discussions, there's some sort of continued societal denial about many of the issues that are floating in the background. Many of the things that are bubbling up in society seem all too much the same. Whether it's school or employers or whatever, there's this kind of overvaluing phenomenon, where the rich and/or successful get more rich and/or successful and we attribute their [increasingly, given increasing inequities] freakish success to something about them, as opposed to being in the right fitting environment at the right point in their careers, or corruption, or something broken in the system, or what. If you're too old, too black, too caring, worked at the wrong place, the place changed, didn't go to a prestigious enough school, were too rebellious as a young adult, whatever, don't know the right people, you're screwed. I'm not sure what my point is, except to say this acceptance-struggle tension you're referring to is even more complicated because it's not just about lowering or raising your own personal expectations or standards, it's about everything else as well, about accepting or struggling against what's broken in society (at the risk of sounding too idealistic or self-righteous). What do you do when it's not self-hatred vs acceptance, but self-hatred vs societal anger vs acceptance?
- zoozla 6y agoAcceptance doesn't mean we stop fighting for justice. It just means we accept the current situation as the starting point from which we begin our fight. Releasing our hold on the anger doesn't mean we stop caring. It means we can use the anger to fuel our good fight and not remain stuck fuming on the sidelines.