Problems compound in the dark. What you won’t look at keeps growing while you wait.
KEY POINTS
- Tolerance can feel like patience or flexibility. Often it’s just avoidance.
- Moral scandals happen when people tolerate wrongdoing instead of naming it clearly.
- Acceptance doesn’t mean giving up hope. It means engaging clearly enough to fight for what matters.
We knew.
We knew that social media was damaging our children. We knew that algorithms were feeding us rage bait because rage keeps us scrolling. We knew that phones in schools were destroying our kids’ ability to concentrate. We knew that online platforms were eroding trust, spreading misinformation, and fracturing communities.
We knew all of this—and yet we did almost nothing.
The evidence built up for more than a decade. Study after study documented the links between social media use and teen anxiety, depression, and self-harm. Whistleblowers showed us that platforms knew their products were harmful and chose profit over safety. Parents watched their children disappear into screens and felt powerless. Teachers watched attention spans collapse.
And what was our collective response? We tutted. We worried. We shared concerned articles—on social media, naturally. We told ourselves someone smarter was working on it, that the market would self-correct, that kids are resilient and it probably wasn’t as bad as it seemed.
We tolerated it.
Now the consequences are here. Legislatures are scrambling to ban phones in schools. Governments around the world are rushing through age-verification laws. Parents are organizing. But these responses are arriving years late, and the forms they are taking are clumsy, reactive, and far more disruptive than they would have been if we’d acted when we first knew the truth.
This is what happens when we tolerate things that we know are wrong rather than accepting reality and confronting it directly. Social media is one example, but the pattern runs through our politics, our institutions, and our collective failure to face hard truths before they become crises.
Tolerance vs. acceptance
Some years ago, I hired someone for a business development role. He looked great on paper and interviewed even better. But within weeks I could see that the work he was doing was both slower and less impactful than what we had agreed. I told myself, “Be patient.” “Don’t micromanage.” “Be trusting and flexible.”
Months passed before I finally addressed it. By then, the conversation was far harder and the outcome far more difficult to fix.
That small experience taught me something I’ve never forgotten: We constantly substitute tolerance for acceptance, and it causes enormous damage.
The two words sound similar. But they conceal two very different concepts. When we tolerate something, we endure it. We hold it at arm’s length, never truly engaging with it, but never confronting it, either. Tolerance builds distance into our relationship with reality.
Acceptance is the opposite. To accept something means to look at it unflinchingly, acknowledging it, naming it, and engaging with it fully, even if what we see is something we dislike or would prefer not to deal with. Acceptance means meeting the world as it is, rather than as we want it to be.
We often treat tolerance as a virtue, as a special kind of patience and open-mindedness. And sometimes it is. But far too often, tolerance is just avoidance wearing a mask of respectability. And avoidance has consequences.
When tolerance becomes complicity
My tolerance of one underperforming employee cost me a few difficult months. But when tolerance becomes a collective habit—when whole organizations, industries, or communities look away together—the consequences compound dramatically.
Many of the moral scandals that mark whole generations are caused not by invisible wrongdoing but by visible wrongdoing that people choose to tolerate. Enron. MeToo. Watergate. In each case, people saw. People knew. But they tolerated the problematic behaviors and outcomes— they tutted, felt uncomfortable, and stayed quiet. And in that quiet was complicity. When we refuse to look facts in the face and respond accordingly, we become responsible for allowing the harmful behavior to flourish.
Look around today and you can see this pattern everywhere in our politics, our institutions, and our public life. Problems that were visible years ago were tolerated until they became crises. And now we act shocked at the mess we find ourselves in.
The AI challenge we’re avoiding
I see the same pattern now with artificial intelligence, and the stakes are even higher.
We are watching extraordinary things happen in real time. AI is unlocking remarkable gains in productivity and driving creative and scientific work that could change the world. But as I discussed in my recent book Transcend, along with the enormous promise of AI come enormous risks.
AI is already displacing jobs and could plausibly cause mass unemployment by the end of the decade. Bad actors are using it to produce deepfakes, power scams, and manipulate elections. We tolerated the erosion of shared reality online, and now AI is accelerating that erosion at a pace we can barely track.
And what is our collective response? We scroll past the headlines. We assume someone smarter is handling it. We tell ourselves it will probably be fine.
We are tolerating AI’s dangers in the same way we tolerated social media’s dangers. And if we continue, the outcome will be the same: by the time we are forced to accept reality, our choices will be narrower, the damage will be deeper, and the cost of acting will be far greater than it needed to be.
So instead of tolerating AI, we need to accept it for what it is—and we need to do it now.
To repeat: acceptance isn’t resignation. Acceptance gives you more agency, not less, because when you engage with what’s real, you can start to make meaningful choices. There is a wisdom in this that goes back millennia. The Bhagavad Gita teaches that freedom comes from seeing things as they are, without the distortion of wishful thinking or fear. This is the distinctive freedom of acceptance, a freedom that opens out into meaningful and wise action.
The inaction that comes with tolerance, on the other hand, is not merely passive. It is a choice. And we cannot evade responsibility for where it leads.
From tolerance to acceptance: three practices
Shifting from tolerance to acceptance isn’t a one-time decision. It’s a practice, one that applies at every scale, from personal relationships to how we engage with the forces reshaping our world. Here are three things you can do.
- Name it early. When something feels off—a hire, a relationship, a technology reshaping your life—say it out loud, even though it feels uncomfortable. You don’t need to turn it into an accusation. Simply make an observation. “I’m noticing X. Am I reading this right?” If you wait until you can’t avoid the problem any longer, you will have diminished your scope for the kind of action that changes outcomes.
- Schedule the conversation you’re avoiding. Right now, there’s probably a conversation you know you need to have but keep pushing off. Put it in the calendar. Acceptance starts when you commit to a moment.
- Ask “What am I hoping will just go away?” Make this a regular question, weekly or monthly. What situation am I enduring rather than engaging with? What am I tolerating because addressing it feels hard? The answer usually surfaces quickly. And once you’ve named it to yourself, it’s harder to keep pretending you don’t see it.
Stop tolerating—and start responding
We watched social media hollow out public trust and damage a generation of children. We knew, and we waited. Now the costs are here and the fixes are late.
We are watching AI reshape work, truth, and power. We know the risks. The question is whether we’ll repeat the same mistake.
The window for meaningful action is shrinking. What we tolerate today, we become responsible for tomorrow.
[Photo: Pug/Adobe Stock]
Original article @ Psychology Today.
