After posting a podcast video about rejection, one person commented something interesting:

I just got rejected for a job, struggled for two days, and I don’t think it had something to do with this. I rather suspect that this job would’ve given me tremendous power to change the world for the better, and not having been given this opportunity, I had to grieve it for two days? There were hardly any self-directed feelings mixed in there. I felt fine about myself, but I also felt dejected… Do you have a video about that too?

I wanted to address this in a post on its own, because the suffering here isn’t actually about ‘rejection’. It’s about thinking I can’t get over a rejection and move on.

What’s happened here is this person feels like they lost something… even though they never had it.

Sadness is the emotion we go through when we’re processing loss. Grief is the intense sadness we experience when we feel that we’ve lost something important, vital, and irreplaceable, and it lasts for as long as we refuse to let go of our attachment to it.

Grief can be separated into two categories: grieving the loss of something we actually had (e.g. death of a loved one), vs grieving for the destruction of a fantasy, i.e. the loss of something we only imagined.

In the case above, this person’s imagination had turned the potential for a job into a full-blown fantasy about saving the world. Her brain had gotten well ahead of reality, imagining things for which there was no evidence. There was no fact-based reason to believe that a) she would get the job, and b) the job would actually allow her to change the world.

Yet, like any of us, she grieves because her mind cannot comprehend how this fantasy failed to come true. That means she was already convinced that it was true. Her imagination had convinced her that she’d get the job AND it would be the opportunity of her dreams.

In my original podcast, I talk about how ‘rejection’ is really just a negative narrative you tell yourself in response to someone else saying No or getting upset.

In this case, she clearly isn’t experiencing negative narratives about herself. Instead, as evidenced by her feelings of grief, some part of her believes there’s something wrong with the universe. Her mind is basically saying that she “should have” gotten the job, and because she didn’t the world simply doesn’t make sense to her anymore.

We all do this.

Feelings of grief, disappointment, frustration and confusion have one thing in common: we’re attached to a fantasy – a belief about how things should be that doesn’t match reality.

Even when we lose something ‘real’, grief is still fantasy-based. We’re torn between the reality (the thing/person is no longer with us) and the fantasy (an ongoing future with the thing/person). She’s grieving for the future experience of a job that never existed.

The obvious way forward when we’re in this position must have something to do with acceptance.

Recovering from grief is largely about reducing the gap between fantasy and reality, coming to terms with WHAT IS by letting go of WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN.

Results don’t lie. If this job was everything she dreamed it would be, then she’d be doing that job right now and loving every minute of it. The fact that she’s not means the job she fantasized about does not exist. It never existed outside of her imagination.

Sure, a job exists for someone else (if they actually filled the position), but that is not what she imagined.

I’m sure it seemed reasonable and realistic. She obviously was convinced that it was going to happen. Any time we feel sadness it simply means we’re still clinging to something because we’re not convinced by reality more than we are by our imagination.

There are millions of jobs you don’t have, and yet you don’t grieve them because you never imagined having them in the first place. Thousands of people die every day, but you don’t even get a little bit sad about them because you never imagined having a future with them personally.

We don’t even grieve that strongly when something comes to an expected end. We don’t cling to things when we’ve accepted their end, like the dying of a very eldery sick relative. We briefly mourn them for the memories, but we quickly recover and move on because we didn’t expect to make any more memories with them.

So what are we to do in this situation?

I believe the answer lies in behaviour. We must act as a person who accepts reality, rather than someone raging against it.

If she accepted that this job doesn’t exist in her reality, what might she do differently vs her current grieving behaviour?

Probably she’d be searching and applying for other similar jobs. She’d be getting on with her day as if the job never existed in the first place, doing what she’d normally do.

And any time her thoughts drifted back to, “Oh I wish I’d just gotten that job and saved the world” she’d quickly self-correct, responding with, “That job never existed for me, otherwise I’d be doing it. I have no proof that I would even enjoy the job because I never experienced it to find out for certain. If it was right for me I would have been hired, so that means it wasn’t right for me”.

There are also deeper fantasies here. Most likely, the job she’s talking about would have had far more limitations than she expects. Very few employed positions allow you to save the world. In fact, it’s basically not possible for one human to save the world.

Odds are, this job she craved had all the negatives of any job: frustrations with management, annoying admin, gossipy workmates, arguments about paid leave, and all the other realities of employment. She would probably have been restricted from saving the work by office politics, lack of funding, and bureaucracy.

We all cling to fantasies. That’s just human.

Enlightenment comes when you realise that they are in fact fantasies, and that clinging to them only causes suffering. It’s in letting go and moving on that we release the burden.

Reality doesn’t care about our desires, dreams, goals and preferences. The universe doesn’t adjust to your ideals. It’s a harsh bastard who only delivers one outcome or the trillions we can imagine, and it is never open to discussion.

As the Ancient Stoics would say, we are tied to the cart. We can either run along beside it, or we can get dragged behind it. But we cannot move the cart. The cart doesn’t even know we exist, and even if it did, it wouldn’t give a shit.

So we can either use our time to grieve and try to understand why we didn’t get what we want, or we can adjust what we want to better match reality in our next attempt.