January is already a rough time for me to pretend to be a functioning adult. Coming back after the holidays feels like trying to re-enter orbit with half a tank of fuel and a checklist you immediately lost. But this year, the reboot feels heavier—not because of one big thing, but a hundred little fractures that add up to an exhausting structural problem.
AI is being rolled out like a miracle cure with the side effects hidden in fine print. Politics—both global and domestic—are drifting toward open hostility and authoritarian nostalgia. Work feels like a battlefield of priorities, expectations, and infrastructure duct-taped together by people who are just as overwhelmed as you. And then there’s the impossible math of being a decent father, leader, partner, and citizen when you’re barely managing to keep the lights on in your own head.
This is where what I’m calling ‘Practical Acceptance’ becomes less of a poetic concept and more of a survival skill.
When I first started thinking about how to write this, I wrote about wabi-sabi—the Japanese appreciation for imperfection— but I instinctively disliked the phrase even as I respected the idea. It felt too pristine, too aesthetic for the messy reality of trying to hold yourself together when you’re already fraying. So I reframed it as Practical Acceptance: the ability to acknowledge the cracks without surrendering to them. Not romanticizing the brokenness, not catastrophizing it—just naming it so you can move with it instead of against it.
Marcus Aurelius understood exactly this kind of heaviness. Meditations wasn’t the ramblings of a serene philosopher-emperor; it was the journal of a man deeply tired of humanity’s nonsense. He wrote: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” (Book 5). He wasn’t saying “cheer up.” He was observing that resistance itself becomes information. The hard days, the foggy days, the “I don’t wanna” days—they’re not moral failings. They’re signals about the direction of pressure and the limits of the system.
Epictetus sharpened the point even further: “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” (Discourses). Most people hear that as stoic bravado. But in context, it was a call for self-compassion. You cannot control the chaos of empire—or modern tech, or geopolitics, or the existential threat of weaponized algorithms—but you can decide not to hate yourself for feeling the weight of it.
Admiral McRaven’s famous “Make Your Bed” speech hits differently when you’re carrying that weight. It’s not a productivity hack; it’s a grounding technique. If the world is spinning, you anchor to one small point of stability: a made bed, an organized desk, a clean shell script. Something simple and doable that reminds you that while you can’t fix everything today, you can take one action that keeps you from unraveling entirely.
For neurodivergent leaders, especially those walking the tightrope of ADHD and executive dysfunction, Practical Acceptance becomes a defense against shame. The internal monologue of “I should be doing better” or “I should be handling this like a grown adult” is not only unhelpful—it’s factually incorrect. No leader, neurodivergent or not, is built to function flawlessly under sustained stress, societal instability, and the creeping dread of technological disruption. You are reacting like a human being in a situation that is fundamentally inhumane. That’s not weakness. That’s calibration.
Practical Acceptance stands on its own, but it also points toward a pattern I’m going to explore more in the coming weeks. There’s a whole ecosystem of ideas—some from Japanese cultural frameworks, some from Stoicism, some from the lived reality of neurodivergent leadership—that orbit the same center of gravity: how to lead when certainty is a myth and the world feels increasingly unmanageable. Not as a checklist or a lifestyle brand, but as a set of lenses that help us navigate pressure without losing our humanity. Each of these ideas approaches the same core challenge from a different direction: how do you stay grounded when the systems you’re operating in are unstable by design? How do you stay purposeful when forward motion feels like wading through mud? And how do you lead people—real, imperfect, exhausted people—without resorting to denial, cynicism, or empty optimism?
Practical Acceptance doesn’t solve those questions, but it gives us the starting point. The honesty. The footing. It lets us say: yes, this is hard, and no, I’m not broken for feeling it, which is the only place real leadership can begin.
Practical Acceptance isn’t pretty. It’s not a motivational poster. It’s a posture you take when the world is off-kilter and you’re still here, doing the work, however imperfectly.
And I hope that sometimes, that is enough.
