Making Your Peace With a World You Don’t Agree With
You can also read this article in Psychology Today here
Greetings from Rome,
Are you having trouble accepting the current state of the world and the direction it’s heading in? Whether it’s climate change, the politics of division, international conflicts, insensitive politicians, the growing loneliness epidemic or increasing disparities between haves and have nots, what’s going on in the world today is cause for concern, to say the least.
Are you weary of feeling like this negativity is circumscribing your life? So are many others.
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I’m guessing that right about now the favorite topic of conversation among your friends is how the world is going to pot. Your doomscrolling of the news—which attracts and keeps eyeballs by over-emphasizing the negative—both produces and confirms what everyone is sharing at the dinner table.
Are you tired of this negativity becoming the story permeating your life? It is true that you created your story and you are the only one who can change it. Yet it is not true that you can change the other characters in it. You’ve likely spent many years trying to do that. It has been a full-time job that supplemented your other full-time job of attempting to be you.
Transcend the World
If you do not wish to go through life in a constant state of anxiety and stress about the other characters in your story—those you can see and touch and those on your social media feeds and news sites—your only option is to accept them as they are. To stop blaming them for being them as best
they know how—rather than being you-as-them-if-you-were-them, which you are not.
The reality of relationships is that people are complex and are characterized by different personalities that manifest every day in how they approach relationships, communication, and life.
As much as you would like to change
another human being, you never succeed.
People change themselves—based on how they have
grown up, what they value and when they feel it is
the right time in their lives to change.
When you provide lip service to acceptance but in truth feel sad, irritated, and frustrated about how another person is—whether it’s a friend or a politician or an unsatisfied billionaire—you fill your life with these negative emotions. You then associate these challenging emotions with the other person, causing you to distance yourself from the perceived source of your angst: them.
Want Change? Begin with Acceptance
You can make the decision to truly, completely accept people as they are. A plethora of studies documents the strong relationship between self-acceptance and the acceptance of others (Williams & Lynn, 2010).
Further, an impressive trove of research has found that individuals facing stressful situations and life conditions—from surviving a natural disaster to managing a learning disability to being imprisoned to facing a debilitating medical disorder or other traumatic life episodes—benefit tremendously from the acceptance of their current situation.
The more you are able to take this cognitive step toward understanding and respecting innate differences that will always be beyond your control, the more inner peace and happiness you will invite into your life.
Step onto the Balcony
If you are like most of us, you probably have not yet made this transformative decision. You have likely spent most of your life preoccupied with the comings and goings and machinations and preferences of the other characters in your story instead of seeing them as they are: as other human beings who enter and exit your stage throughout your life.
To transcend the perpetual drama that is your
story, the first step is to step off of the stage
and onto the balcony, and observe yourself on stage,
in the middle of your story, interacting
with the other characters.
We are the only animals with such stories. We feel guilt, worry, anxiety, even depression because of our fixation on our story—especially on the gap between how we wish our story had evolved versus how it actually has.
Dogs, cats, ferrets, and rhinos do not feel all these complex emotions based on the complex plotlines of their previous social encounters, or their fears about how they will navigate future social encounters. They just live.
Can you “just live”? Easier said than done. While I can’t give you a recipe book to achieve this peaceful, exalted state, I can tell you that the first step toward it is acceptance—of everyone and everything around and within you.
To your capacity to practice acceptance as the foundational first step toward fostering change in your life and in the world,
Anthony
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Newspapers and magazines serve a purpose: filtering through the thousands of potential news stories to distill those “worthy” of mass consumption.
Yes, it’s true that a lot of interesting and important news stories are filtered out by subjective editors with personal agendas. Yet it’s also true that, without such filtering, reading what anyone deems noteworthy can cause what we ascribe as the “news” to lose its value.
It calls into question the role of social media in our lives.
The director of the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction, David Greenfield, put it well when he shared with me that he’s “questioning this idea that social media has anything to do with social contact. I think it’s actually completely the opposite. The only reason why social media exists is really to keep your eyes on screens to sell you stuff. That’s the model.”
How will you connect with others meaningfully in real time in our current age of distraction?
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