Acceptance

January 15, 2025

3-Item Status

• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: The Status Game by William Storr

• Listening: Chasing Shadows by Santigold

If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status.

Quick Notes

• New Work: This week’s Let’s Know Things is about the LA Wildfires, and yesterday’s Brain Lenses essay was about Swearing and Physical Performance. Last Friday’s piece for Writing & Such was on living Life vs Writing About It.

• MKE: This won’t apply to almost everyone on this list, but if you’ll be in Milwaukee this Sunday, come participate in the little silent reading group I’ve been running (that link is for last week’s get-together, but it’s every Sunday at the same time and place).

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Acceptance

I know several people who are currently struggling to accept aspects of reality that don’t align with 1. who they believed they would be, 2. how they believed they would feel, or 3. what they believed the world would look like at this moment in time.

When the facts on the ground don’t align with our preferences (and assumptions with where they would end up), that can be difficult to bear.

But if we refuse to work these data points and (at times, truly uncomfortable) truths into our mental models, we limit our capacity to affect and improve upon them.

We can cling to alternative justifications, arguments, and imaginings for as long as we like, and we may even be able to convince ourselves that we were robbed, were hookwinked, were treated unfairly by the universe. That might even be true, from some perspectives and by some metrics, at least.

It’s important to recognize, though, that accepting doesn’t mean approving of something: it just means looking at the facts, acknowledging the actuality of our situation, and adjusting our mental frameworks accordingly.

We don’t have to think a natural disaster, a personal trauma, or a political turn of events is good or fair in order to incorporate it into our understandings and plans.

We don’t have to let go of long-held ambitions or long-cherished beliefs, either; we just have to identify the core of these things and then figure out what that core looks like within a new context.

If we always assumed achieving a particular job title or income level would bring us happiness and fulfillment, but we lose our jobs, and our career trajectories (and near-future income potential) are thus disrupted, we can still pursue happiness and fulfillment; we just have to do so via other means, possibly taking entirely other paths to get there.

Acceptance isn’t approval, and it isn’t settling, either.

Settling is actually deciding not to accept these new realities, because we can’t meaningfully move the dial on anything until we defy our brains’ (understandably protective, but ultimately misguided) impulse to wallow in denial and not think about things that are painful to think about.

Only by recognizing the cold, hard facts of a situation, though—and then making plans based on that acceptance of reality—can we hope to meaningfully (and maybe even positively) influence them.

This won’t always be straightforward or easy, and there may be internal or external variables working against us in this effort.

But there’s power in (eventually) being able to say, “This sucks, but it’s how things are now. Knowing that, where should I be investing my time, energy, and resources? Where do I go from here?”

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.

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Interesting Links

• Surveillance Self-Defense Guide

• Routeshuffle: The Random Running Route Generator

• An Unintellectual Theory of Tastiness in Art History

If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.

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I swapped out my mechanical keyboard for this more ergonomic one a few months ago, and it has substantially eased the carpal-tunnel I sometimes suffer in my left wrist. Huge difference—wasn’t expecting that, especially not so immediately.

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What Else

I knocked out the first chapter of the book I’m working on over this past week: 13,000 words (and several partial-revisions) later, I’m feeling really good about it. And I can’t wait to sit down and work on the project each day (which is a good sign).

I picked my girlfriend up at the airport yesterday, as while I was away in Seattle for the holidays, she was visiting family on the East Coast.

It’s wonderful having her back, though from experience I know also it’ll be weird (for us both) at first, as we relearn how to share space and accomodate each other’s habits, routines, and priorities (after a period of comparable self-centric living).

Lots of positives, of course, including that it can be beneficial to disrupt otherwise too-rigid schedules and such, semi-regularly. But I’m steeling myself for the couple of days during which sleep will be tricky, and during which my (till now, flawless) book-writing schedule will probably be knocked askew, as well.

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Every orbital rocket launch, 1957-2024. (video)