Travelin Monkey

In order to properly understand why we seek acceptance, we must first think  of acceptance as something tangible, allocating the properties of quantity and quality. When one thinks of these properties, one can imagine that there exists a hierarchy in both quantity and quality; you can have a lot of people accept you, but it could be a superficial acceptance. This is known in high school as the “most popular” person around. You can also have zero acceptance by all, also known as a recluse. These two situations represent the tail ends, the eccentricities of the acceptance spectrum. Hence, one can see that acceptance is proportional to shallowness. The more one seeks to be accepted, the more shallow that person is. Why?

Insecurities force us to not want to be rejected and when one seeks many for acceptance, it draws on the fact that those who will ‘accept’ do so on a superficial, what you see is what you get, level.  You can then conclude that this person seeks this level of acceptance because that is the depth in which they understand themselves, to the extent where they are comfortable and secure with themselves. The deeper one dives into the self, the less acceptance they seek, the more narrow the pool of people from whom they seek acceptance becomes.

There are four groups of people you would want to accept you; strangers, family, friends, and lovers. Those on the most shallow end seek acceptance not only from friends, but also mostly from strangers. They care what people they don’t know say about them. I feel that when you seek acceptance from family, you do so with a knife at hand, ready to cut the umbilical cord and become an adult, break free and become an individual to suffer in the adult world.

You seek acceptance from lovers because you share something sacred, something intimate, something that makes you feel special and yet very vulnerable, from your body to your heart, you let them in hoping they take better care of what they find than the owner. Acceptance from a lover is hard to attain, easy to lose, and more valuable and meaningful to the self than anything else in the world.

And finally, we reach what we deal with in a day to day basis, what we question day in and day out. Why do I care if my friends accept me? The answer is a very interesting one and ties in all the other ‘acceptances’ together. Although there are many ‘types’ of friends, the essence is still the same. When you attain a friend, you “let them in” less than a lover and not quite like family. They are visitors whom you tread your path of life with, they are your allies against hardships we all face.

Do you know what happens when you let them in? They walk with you, sometimes they push you forward, sometimes they carry you forward, but no matter what they do, the leave their imprint on your path of life, an imprint sometimes so deep that you can never forget or erase it. An instantaneous view of that short path with a friend can be said to add meaning to that part of your life. You tell the friend “You have augmented tremendous meaning to my life and it is something that will stay with me until my last breath. And in this instant, you have helped give this section of my life a more defined meaning with your imprint”

When one sums up the ‘instances’ of their life with the friends that left these never-ending marks, that is when they attain meaning to their existence. And thus, this is why we seek acceptance from friends, to help give the time we have a touch of spice by accepting their imprints as they accept ours. Mine, yours, your neighbor, it doesn’t matter who passed by. In the very end, at our funerals, if you could sum up the memories all these imprints that are being relived in mourning, you would end up with a movie of what that person meant to the world, to those people, no matter how deep nor shallow.

This is why we endlessly seek acceptance, to exponentially increase the value of our life, maybe selfishly for ourselves, maybe selflessly for the family itself, or maybe altruistically for someone we don’t even know, as a beacon of inspiration. In the end, Memento Mori, remember death, for that is when the movie of your life and your imprints will be relived. Make sure they play the movie you seek to be re-lived by living as if you are recording.

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