The Age of Acceptance

So I'm in what I call the age of acceptance. What does that even mean? For the last few years, I spent a lot of time contemplating the nature of things, of people, and I was kind of depressed and frustrated about all of it. But lately that's changed. Lately, I'm calm. Sometimes I'm so calm it's eerie, and I catch myself going, wait, what's happening here, why am I okay?

And I want to be precise about the word, because "acceptance" isn't quite it. What I've actually done is come to terms. There's a difference. Acceptance sounds like you've fully made peace, fully embraced the thing. Coming to terms is smaller and more honest; it's a truce. There's this thing, xyz, I was not ready to accept at all. I'm still not. But now I can at least say, okay, 75% of that is true, so let's stop fighting it and move on. That's coming to terms. That's where I actually am.

And I don't mean coming to terms with my career, or any one thing. I mean everything. People, and how they actually are instead of how I want them to be. The way life actually works. My own behaviour, the patterns I'm not proud of. The good and the rotten of the world, all of it. It's one move, the same move, pointed at all of it. Comparison and career is just where I can see it sharpest, so that's where I'll dig in, but don't mistake the example for the thing.

So let's dive into it. The thing under all of this is Time. And time comes from death. You only have "time left" because there's an end coming, without death, time is just an endless flat thing that means nothing. So contemplating time is really contemplating death. But here's the question I kept skipping: how did I even get to death? What dragged me there?

Suffering dragged me there. And this is the part I could never get onto paper properly, so let me actually do it now.

When you're deep enough in suffering, you hit nihilism. Real nihilism. Your values, your morality, the whole inherited script you were handed about what matters and what you're supposed to want, it all starts looking arbitrary, made-up, pointless. You sit there, going, none of this means anything. And that's a kind of death already, the death of meaning. The thing you thought the world ran on just isn't there when you look for it. That's what suffering does: it walks you right up to the void and makes you stare at it.

And for a while, that's bleak as hell. But then the thing flips. Because if none of it inherently matters, and the time is limited anyway, then it technically doesn't matter what I do. And that's not crushing. That's the most freeing thing I've ever felt. The strings get cut. There's no objective scoreboard I'm losing on, no correct life I'm failing to live. So I'm free to just build the life that's actually mine.

That flip is the whole thing. That's where the acceptance comes from. Not from giving up, from realising nothing was ever mandatory in the first place.

So then the only question left is, who am I, actually, underneath the script? And the suffering already did me a favour here, because it burned the borrowed wants off. For years, I thought I wanted the car, the big house, the standard stuff you're supposed to chase. And after enough suffering and enough nihilism, I realised that's just not my nature. I want a minimal life. A life that's not rich in things but rich in moments, quality time with my kids, travelling, that's the stuff that actually does it for me. Money doesn't disappear from that picture, by the way. I still need it, plenty of it. But it flips the role: money becomes the means to those moments, not the trophy I'm chasing for its own sake. Not materialism. Just fuel.

Because look, we're drowning in hustle culture, this pressure to have succeeded by some absurdly early age, which was just not a thing before. My friend started a cafe, and my honest first thought was what the fuck are we doing? Why am I not doing that? My crush, who lives in the US, lives this insanely aesthetic life, and again, same spiral. And I let myself fall into it for a few days before I stopped and asked: " Why is someone else's life the metric? And the nihilism answers it for me; there is no metric. There's no scoreboard. His life is geared to his specifications, mine to mine, and the second you really get that, "ahead" stops meaning anything. We're not even on the same map.

I think of the suffering like XP in a game, but not a leaderboard, that's the trap. You pay a certain amount of suffering to see clearly, to burn off the fake wants and find what's actually yours. The higher the level, the more it costs. My cafe friend has paid a lot. He's suffered, he's seen way more of the world than I have, so he's further along his own burning-off; that's why he's the one starting a venture. That's his XP buying his thing. It was never a race I was behind in. And the other thing about XP, you don't go chasing it, you don't romanticise the pain, you don't farm suffering. That's broken. Life hands it to you whether you want it or not. You just don't waste what it teaches you.

So now I can run the whole chain the right way up:

Suffering drags you into nihilism, and nihilism is the death of meaning; that's how suffering hands you death. Death, in turn, is what gives time its weight; you finally feel the clock. And time is what makes you come to terms with things, because once you've felt the clock and seen that nothing's mandatory, comparison and hustle and "why not me" just look like a waste of the one thing you can't get more of.

Suffering → death → time → acceptance.

That's it. That's why I'm calmer now. Not because I've "accepted" everything in some serene, finished way, I haven't, remember, it's a truce, it's 75%. But I've come to terms enough to take people as they actually are, life as it actually works, the world with all its good and its rot, and my own self with my own minimal, moment-hungry nature, and stop fighting any of it. What's right for someone else might just not be right for me, full stop. The clock is the clock. So I build the peaceful life that's mine and keep marching on my own track.

I've realised this before. Many times. I just never took it seriously. This time, I think I do.