We all need to stop accepting.
Stop accepting the small things around you. Stop accepting the problems that surround you. Stop accepting the world as it is.
Perhaps complacency is the right word to use, but the feeling is all the same. I think people today have gotten too comfortable just accepting things as the way they are.
Take the room you’re sitting in right now. How much of it have you actually observed? Do you understand how the electricity is coming out of the outlet? How your ceiling light is supported by your thin walls? If the answer is no, ask yourself why. Why have I never thought about this?
Honestly, I never thought about any of these things too. Before this year, I just accepted them. I accepted that if I plugged my MacBook charger into a wall, I would see it’s percentage rise. That flicking the lights on my room would illuminate it. But as they failed and I investigated, I became intrigued. These small moments made me realize I knew very little about the world I was living in, and that pushes me to now question everything. To be curious. And I encourage you to do the same.
But not just for the random things in your life, be curious about your problems. It’s shocking to realize that the majority of health complications in the US happen because people just accept their pain rather than going to the ER. It’s easy to sit at home and complain about your state compared to fixing it. But it’s waiting that compounds the magnitude of the problem. And this is true for all of your problems too.
From procrastinating to addiction to minor inconveniences you’ve changed your schedule to accommodate for, we all just live with our problems.
Now let me change your perspective. Think about Instacart. Some guy hated that he had to keep going to get groceries on his busy schedule, so he built a multi-billion dollar company just because he couldn’t accept this gap. Think about AirBnB. It’s founders couldn’t pay rent in SF so they rented out mattresses in their apartment. Think about Uber. Same story. Thank about Spotify. Same story.
The apps you consider essential today are just problems that people stopped accepting. So why are you accepting your problems? Identify them and understand them. Then solve them.
Our world is full of things to learn and problems to solve. Since I’ve been thinking through this lens, everything feels different. I feel more present. I feel connected in a sense. So the next time you go out to a new place, looking up at the ceiling and question the lights. Next time you encounter a problem, think about it seriously. There’s nothing wrong with curiosity—it’s just who we are.