Get to acceptance quickly
Accept reality fast to ease pain, prioritize friendships, date with focused attention, and progress by removing friction not pushing harder.
July 26th, 2025 - Issue #128 - read online
👋 Welcome to Pursuit—your weekly pause for intentional living, self-discovery, and inner clarity. My name is Amir, and every week I share four carefully chosen ideas to help you design a more fulfilling life.
This week at a glance:
✨ Get to acceptance quickly
👥 A person is a person because of other people
🤍 Attention is the currency of dating
🧊 Adding force vs. removing friction
✨ Get to acceptance quickly
Most pain isn’t about what happened—it’s about the future we imagined but will never live. Heartbreak, rejection, disappointment—what hurts most is mourning a reality that only existed in our minds.
Steven Bartlett gave his friends a simple but powerful piece of advice: get to acceptance as fast as you can. Not because the pain isn’t real, but because resistance to reality only prolongs it.
Mo Gawdat put it into an equation: Happiness = Your perception of events - Your expectations of how life should be. When expectations don’t match reality, suffering begins. The sooner we let go of the "should have been," the sooner we find peace with what is.
Pain is inevitable. But suffering? That’s often just the space between reality and acceptance. The faster we close the gap, the lighter we become.
👥 A person is a person because of other people
This conversation between Simon Sinek and Trevor Noah about friendship, loneliness, and vulnerability is likely to be the most valuable content you’re going to consume this month. Here’s what I want to highlight for you:
We celebrate ambition, family, and romantic love, but friendship often becomes an afterthought—something squeezed in when time allows. Yet, when we struggle, it’s rarely work that saves us. It’s friends.
The mistake isn’t just neglecting friendships; it’s expecting too much from everything else. We demand that work provide purpose, that our partners fulfill every emotional need, that family be our only source of belonging. We’ve abandoned the spaces—neighborhoods, communities, casual gatherings—where friendships once thrived.
Real friendship isn’t just proximity or convenience. It’s an investment. It’s prioritizing the people who will be there when success fades, when careers shift, when life becomes uncertain. It’s making time, not just assuming time will appear.
A person is a person because of other people. The challenge isn’t finding friendships—it’s committing to them.
Here are a few things you can start doing to foster deeper friendships:
Invest in it like any other priority – Schedule time for friends with the same seriousness as a business meeting.
Express love openly – A simple "I love you" to a friend can be more powerful than any grand gesture.
Be present, even in silence – The best friendships don’t require fixing problems; they require showing up, sitting in the struggle together.
In a world increasingly dominated by individualism, rekindling our commitment to friendship may be the most radical act of connection we have left. Because at the end of it all, work won’t be what saves us—our friendships will.
🤍 Attention is the currency of dating
We like to think more options lead to better outcomes, yet in dating an overflow of choice often breeds doubt, not clarity.
Apps turn connection into arithmetic. Endless chats, overlapping prospects, constant calculations. Instead of meeting one person and seeing where it leads, many keep hedging, afraid that choosing one means missing someone better. Paradoxically, abundance rarely deepens connection. It makes commitment harder.
Dating several people at once is like trying to watch six films at the same time. None leave a lasting mark. True connection asks for depth, but modern culture rewards breadth. The real challenge is knowing when to shift gears. Move to exclusivity too soon and you may confuse novelty with compatibility. Wait too long and you might lose something real.
A healthier approach is to stay open yet intentional. If a date gathers momentum, lean in. You do not need others queued up for a sense of safety. Remember that excitement is not proof of compatibility. Sometimes it is just chemistry playing tricks.
Real connection grows on mutual interest, not one-sided pursuits. When attention is not reciprocated, it is time to invest elsewhere.
✨ From How to Stop Yourself Over-Investing in Early Dating
🧊 Adding force vs. removing friction
Velocity is progress. Sometimes progress comes from adding more force, and sometimes, progress comes from removing friction. Once you have a destination, you can improve your velocity by working harder and eliminating things that aren’t contributing toward reaching that goal.
✨ From The Perfect Pause
🇵🇸 If you want to support my work, commit to donating $10/month to the children of Gaza—living in what is now the deadliest place on Earth.
🎵 Music I’m listening to
You’ll find mostly Ethnotronica, Organic House, World, Disco, and Organic Electronic here:
🎧 If you appreciate the music I carefully select and haven't followed my Spotify playlists yet, now is the perfect time to hit that follow button and join me on this musical journey! 🎶
🌒 Pano: Danceable and electronic obscure songs
🌓 Sisy: Ethnotronica and organic house
🌑 Berghain: Dark, minimal techno and tech house
🌕 Heide: Groovy soul and disco house
🌞 Sonntag: Afterhours shit
🦥 Slow rave: Sleepy techno for tired danced
🌎 World: From Latin jazz to Turkish psych
🌚 Super Slow: For your intimate moments
Previously on Pursuit:
