Rejection

I always thought about rejection as a negative thing, because we discriminate, and nowadays discrimination is something banned in our society, but thinking about it made me realize that we need rejection to know who we are, and what we want. Reading Mark Mason in «The subtle art of not giving a fuck» I realized that we need rejection in our lives. To reject something is an action we do to deny the acceptance of a thing, and action or a behaviour (never a person), and it becomes physical or by gesture that we say «No» to whatever is being offered.

To be rejected may cause us various reactions and feeling, we may feel dissapointed or humiliated, but there is no personal matter in rejection, unless it is a direct rejection against our person, and that is impossible, because we all have the same capacities to do things.

The avoidance of rejection (both giving and receiving) is often sold to us as a way to make ourselves feel better. But avoiding rejection gives us short-term pleasure by making us rudderless and directionless in the long term. To truly appreciate something, you must confine yourself to it, yes, it is a private matter.

When we make a choice in our lives, there’s a certain level of joy and meaning that you reach in life only when you’ve spent decades investing in a single relationship, a single craft, a single career. And you cannot achieve those decades of investment without rejecting the alternatives. The act of choosing a value for yourself requires rejecting alternative values; marriage, career opportunities, studies, partner, jobs, etc.

In the end we need to care, to give a fuck about something, in order to value something. And to value something, we must reject what is not that something. To value X, we must reject non-X. That rejection is an inherent and necessary part of maintaining our values, and therefore our identity. We are wat we choose, and also we are what we reject. We are defined by what we choose to reject. And if we reject nothing, we essentially have no identity at all. We cannot have it all, if we do have it, then we have nothing.

The desire to avoid rejection at all costs, to avoid confrontation and conflict, the desire to attempt to accept everything equally and to make everything cohere and harmonize, is a deep and subtle form of entitlement. (Mason, Mark. The subtle art of not giving a fuck)