Our expectations about how much we can control can affect our happiness.
Key points
- Life is the process of controlling those things that are individually important.
- Everyone has a private collection of preferences about how they like things to be.
- Control occurs whether we’re completely aware of it or not.
- Controlling is most straightforward when we help the controlling efforts of others.
Control is an indisputable part of life. Super control and lousy control are the same processes. Controlling how heated our body is and controlling how heated an argument gets occurs in the same way. Instances of control involve mobs of little units in our brain called control systems. These control systems constantly keep the focus of their attention on the particular aspect of the world they’ve been configured to protect.
Some things can be easier to control than others. Maintaining the level of oxygen in our blood is an example of control that is usually pretty straightforward. Collecting eggs or hanging out the washing might be similarly uncomplicated. Organizing the perfect Thanksgiving dinner for an extended family or the perfect wedding event involving three different ceremonies with different guests, outfits, routines, and protocols are occasions that are more difficult to control.
A night out with some special friends might be easy to control. It may be, however, that, without even realizing it, you expect the drinks order to be taken within three to five minutes of being seated, the meal order will be taken four to six minutes after that, the drinks will be delivered within eight minutes of the order being taken, and the meals will take no longer than 23 minutes to be brought to the table. With these precise and detailed specifications in mind, you are much more likely to experience bumps and knocks to the state of the evening you are trying to maintain.
On the other hand, perhaps as long as your friends Priscilla, Clement, Emmanuel, Grace, Patrick, Abebe, Meg, and Innocent all turn up within half an hour of each other, things will be fine. Maybe you’re the sort of person who can be very relaxed about the timing of the food and the drinks. You might not be particularly bothered about where people sit, and you might not even have strong preferences about the venue. If your main priority is to see this particular collection of friends in close proximity to you for a few hours, your mission will be a lot less likely to be ruffled than the previous scenario involving a string of very specific requirements.
Control is nothing more high falutin’ than the business of making things be the way you want them to be. Sometimes you might not even be aware that you like things a certain way until they are not that way. You might not know, for example, that you expect drinks to be delivered within a particular time frame until you become irritated when that doesn’t happen.
Universally, people have preferences about the way they want things to turn out. So, they do what they can to overcome the jostling effects of the environment that would otherwise prevent those things from turning out the way you want.
World leaders have notions, perhaps, about: the way they will relate to other world leaders; the extent to which they will commit to combatting climate change; the conditions of trade agreements they enter into; the duration of time they want to remain a world leader (and the lengths to which they will go to make that happen); and so on.
Similarly, people in refugee camps could have ideas about: how to source the food they need; how to keep their children safe; who they spend time with; and other aspects of daily survival.
Although world leaders and displaced people might seem to have extraordinarily different lives, they are all doing the same thing, from a control perspective. They keep the world they inhabit in the state they want it to be in. The state it must be in, from their perspective. That’s control.
We can’t help ourselves but to control. Whether or not we succeed in hitting the target on every occasion is beside the point. We cannot not have targets and we cannot not keep pursuing them. Sometimes it’s so effortless we don’t even know we’re doing it. At other times it’s so difficult it feels like we’re being forced to accept this duty. Whether it’s easy or hard, good or bad, it’s the same control; the same process.
More resources can make control easier. If you have the desire but not the dollars to go to university, you might take work you are not interested in, or that doesn’t make the best use of your talents to pay for your degree. You may not relinquish the goals and ambitions you have formed, but it could feel harder and much drearier than taking a more direct path that greater resources would allow.
Accepting and getting to know our own controlling natures can help us become clearer about what we need to live the life we want. Whether it’s a go-with-the-flow life or a succeed-at-any-cost life, it’s the same controlling life. Maybe, if we all understood ourselves as controllers, we might work harder at both getting out of the way of control and also helping it happen smoothly and successfully.
Ultimately, we might also finally realize that, as controllers in a legion of other controllers, our controlling efforts are at their finest when we assist others in gaining control over their lives.
