cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/38799262
Let me explain what I mean:
radical acceptance: ever think about how your coworkers are morons, your elderly parents have declined beyond recognition and actively work against you and seem to live to ruin every single one of your days, your boss is an insufferable, exploitative ass, your uncle has lung cancer but keeps smoking a pack a day, your teenager daughter is doing drugs because is trendy, just like you did when you were her age? You cannot change how any of those actors in your life behave, people are free to do whatever they want, even to do stupid crap like that. Trying to change any of those actors is futile and guarantees your mental health decreases overtime and they resent you for caring about them. The better but not ideal solution? Radical acceptance. They are what they are, don’t try to change them, accept them how they are. Let them fail.
This was suggested to me while talking about relatives with dementia and other mental illnesses, but I don’t know if I’m stretching the definition too much.
Spineless conformist: if there are things I cannot control nor change, like climate change, lack of a public healthcare system in America, fptp, maga… why even try? I’d be both radical accepting reality while being a spineless conformist.
Where’s do you draw the line?
The typical therapist advice about focusing only on the things you can personally change does not work well on macro issues. Issues that were created by lots of people working together like climate change require a bunch of people working together to fix. A bunch of people who don’t individually have the power to make any significant impact.
Moral philosophers get bogged down trying to figure out how to do a calculus that would reasonably obligate each individual to join the cause via our normal feelings of responsibility but these generally feel unintuitive and lack the kind of motivating responsibility most people feel towards things they had more control in creating or causing. I like Pinkert’s early work to help get my head around issues of collective responsibility and individual motivation.
Fact is that a whole lot of people need to take a leap of commitment to solve collective problems because if everyone acts rationally (in terms of their proportional responsibility to the problem and capacity to fix it) there is not nearly enough capacity to make a dent in issues like environmental pollution.
On the level of day to day life it depends on how you’re applying the advice but I personally don’t find it comforting to be told there’s nothing I can do to intervene—in this case too I feel better trying -something- and failing frequently vs forcing myself to be zen about my friend turning to drugs or my boss being a jerk all the time because my rational brain says my efforts won’t make a difference anyway.
But collaborating with others to address macro problems is something you can personally do.
I think people naturally extend their unresolved issues and the concomitant behaviors into the macro scale, and that it is precisely by resolving the personal issues on a smaller scale that you gain greater power over your own life. As you do, your methods and behaviors spread, because people learn well by example, particularly when that example “wins” and comes from a natural place of acceptance.
As people resolve their piece of the pie, they run into others who have, likewise, resolved their piece of the pie. …and, together, they do greater things, because they are capable of it, not tangled an a huge ball of personal issues, and why not too something or contribute to something you want to see done in the world?
The massive issues we have a a society are precisely because we have too much emotionally charged information, and haven’t processed that information - and because the blind spots you have in your own personal life and with your own personal issues become your cultures, your nation’s, and the world’s problems as you gain power.
Sorting through your issues, and resolving your blind spots means your power increases. And, as you do, then the scope of what you, personally can change grows - in part, because you are also more effective at working with others and rejecting (or similarly handling) problematic authority as you do.