Recently I have been interviewing a lot of applicants for a masters program at the university I teach at and one thing that has been coming up as a recurring theme for many of these students is the desire or need for control. It manifests itself in various ways, though for example needing to be the leader of a group, wanting to know the exact structures of courses, building to-do lists constantly. What’s interesting in my opinion is that many of these are sought after traits that are rewarded handsomely by society. We praise people who have got it together and have control over their lives – and rightly so. I would much rather prefer to have it together than the opposite.
The issue is when this stops being a choice, and instead becomes a compulsion or a need. I suspect that this is already the case for many of the applicants, and when asked they tend to blush and admit that they are working on it. Which suggests to me that they inherently know that something is of balance in this behaviour or compulsion and that they can see its shadow side. Virtually all of them are unaware what is driving the compulsion, and as we dig deeper through questions we often arrive at this compulsion for control is masking a deeper fear.
That fear for many (not all) is a fear of being out of control. What does it mean to be out of control though? It simply means that you are at the will of the universe and that you can react as situations occur without the need for pre planning and preparation. It is interesting t think that this is likely how most of the natural world lives. I can’t imagine ducks flying around with a to-do list in their heads, or hamsters planning their FIRE (financial independent, retire early). This need for control over our environment seems to be isolated to only a few of the animal species.
Have you ever noticed the other species that do spend their time planning for the future seem particularly frantic? Take the squirrel for example. They rush around hiding acorns all summer in order to survive winter. An interesting aside is that they actually don’t remember where they hide their acorns, they just check places they would likely have hidden them when they need the food stash and voila there they are. The point though is that they don’t look particularly ta peace with themselves. I would hazard to suggest that our compulsion for controlling our environments is detrimental in the same way to ourselves. It costs us presence, and creates a stress a stress response inside of ourselves.
I might just be getting older, or perhaps I was oblivious to it before, but peoples compulsion for control seems to be growing. Especially amongst the best and brightest students. It is typical for students to ask me the day before what will be in the lecture tomorrow? Revealing the content of the lecture isn’t a problem for me, but enabling and enhancing their compulsion feel icky to me. Often I ask students to carry out a task, and when asking students what questions they have, a similar curious question pops up – what will we do after we are finished with this task?
Assuming this trend towards control has been increasing recently, I find myself asking what’s driving it or what has been shaping it. The easy answer for me seems to be smartphones, and the underlying tech. I know it is fashionable to beat-up on big tech these days, but that’s not what this is about. Its just acknowledging the dark side to what are often fantastic tools. With a smart phone you have access to all of the worlds known knowledge, which means any question you have is likely already answered, or at least someone has an opinion on it. If you need to know how to get somewhere there is maps. If you need to change an appointment you can easily contact the other people involved. There is very little uncertainty involved when you have a smart phone.
I remember when I was cycling through China in 2007, there was no smart phones, google maps didn’t exist, tourist information on the Chinese countryside was limited. Getting access to good information was time consuming, and often costly with regards to having to spend time in internet cafes (something that barely exists in developed countries). The uncertainty was crushing. Where would you sleep each night, where was the next place we could get water, how far was the next town, were there a lot of hills, and were we going the right way. I remember it being a lot of mental pressure, and the later in the day it got, the more the stress would build. I did my best to stay calm in these moments, but over the months the stress was taxing. It would gnaw away at you like a dull ache inside your head. I was lucky in the sense that I grew up without smart phones, so this uncertainty was just a large part of life.
In no way am I suggesting we all throw out our smart phones, and go live in caves in order to regain some comfort in the face of uncertainty. There is likely a simpler middle path that might involve training our comfort in the discomfort of uncertainty. There might be a path around acknowledging our fears and finding a way to soothe these. There might be a way to use our skills of control with the benefits they entail, while acknowledging their shadow side too. I don’t have a crystal clear answer to this issue, I do know that there is two strategies I find useful.
The first is being present to what’s going on inside ourselves. Journaling is an excellent tool for building this sense of self awareness, so it talking to friends who have the emotional intelligence required to go deep on issues like this. The other is training ourselves in the discomfort of being uncertain. This might be carrying out tasks where you don’t have the full set of instructions, going on mini adventures where you don’t know the route or the destination, not planning and simply being in the moment.
The final commentary I would like to add on the issue of the fear of the unknown is that I think it belies a ack of trust in our own capacity to dea with whatever pops up for us personally. We plan conversations in our head, because we are uncertain how we will deal with them in ral life. We plan for disasters in our ehad, so that we know what steps to take should they occur. What if instead we simply trusted ourselves to deal appropriately with whatever occurs in our lives. We have made it thus far in life, and there is therefore almost definitely a winning strategy underlying all of this. I doubt that most of us have gotten where we are through pure luck. Therefore there must be something appropriate about who we are are.
Perhaps we can learn to trust ourselves to handle life, and we can let go of being the frantic squirrel who misses out on summer because we are so frantic hiding away acorns as we repeat the mantra winter is coming. Whatever will be, will be, and there is above average chance we will survive the next few encounters with life before our number comes up. Lets spend our time enjoying now, with a sense of calm and acceptance that we are appropriate and inherently prepared for the moments ahead.
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