Recognize and Resolve vs. Condone and Cope

Recognize and Resolve vs. Condone and Cope

This isn’t a philosophy. It’s a working method for living inside the real world without getting slowly buried by it.

Most of the weight people carry doesn’t come from major crises. It comes from small, repeatable things that get noticed, named, and then quietly absorbed into daily life. A pattern that keeps showing up. A habit that drains more than it gives back. A relationship dynamic that never quite settles. A job, a routine, or a mental loop that creates low-grade friction every single day.

In the Unencumbered way of thinking, recognizing something isn’t a conclusion. It’s a trigger for action.

To recognize is to move toward resolution. To stop at the moment of awareness and ask: What is actually happening here? Why does this keep repeating? What can be changed, replaced, removed, or redesigned so this doesn’t stay part of the system? Resolution doesn’t mean perfection. It means movement. It means refusing to let the same problem keep collecting rent in your life without a plan attached to it.

Condoning and coping works differently.

That’s when something gets noticed, labeled, and then normalized. The problem stays. Life bends around it. Routines form to manage it instead of remove it. Energy goes into tolerating, justifying, or medicating the friction rather than redesigning the conditions that produce it. The system adapts—but in the wrong direction.

This isn’t about blame, toughness, or “fixing yourself.”

It’s about treating your life the way you’d treat a piece of field gear, a vehicle, or a shelter. If something rubs, rattles, leaks, or fails, you don’t call it a personality trait. You don’t cope with it forever. You adjust it. You reinforce it. You swap the part. You change how it’s used.

Recognizing and resolving is adaptation.

Condoning and coping is accommodation.

One leads to lighter systems. The other leads to heavier ones.

This episode isn’t here to tell you how to live. It’s here to offer a simple filter you can run anything through—work, relationships, habits, gear, expectations, even your own thinking:

Is this something I’m actively resolving, or something I’ve just learned how to live around?

No sermons. No prescriptions. Just a practical way to stop stepping over the same loose board every day and finally decide whether to fix it, move it, or walk a different path entirely.