Why Trying to Control Everything Makes You Miserable

I used to think that if I just planned enough, worked hard enough, and optimized enough, I could eliminate uncertainty from my life. I had a five-year plan, a morning routine, a budget, and a system for everything. If something went wrong, I treated it as a failure of planning. I should have anticipated it. I should have controlled it.

This approach worked for a while. Then it stopped working. The more I tried to control, the more anxious I became. The tighter I held on, the more slipped through my fingers.

Alan Watts wrote about this. In The Meaning of Happiness, he wrote that those who search for happiness do not find it, because they are trying to manufacture it by the very means which defeat it.

The Prodigal Son as modern man

Watts uses the parable of the Prodigal Son to explain civilization. The younger son leaves home, wastes his fortune, and ends up feeding pigs. The elder son stays home and resents the celebration when his brother returns.

Civilized man is the prodigal. He has wandered far from nature. He has built machines, cities, and systems. He has become utterly dependent on them. But then comes the famine. In our own day, war and economic disorganization are the famine. There is no actual scarcity of wealth. Men starve only because of human stupidity.

In time, some people come to themselves. They realize that in some way or other we must return to nature and experience in full consciousness the harmony which the primitive has by unconscious instinct.

But Watts makes an important point. Civilization’s departure from nature is an essential stage in human development. Without it, we would remain like the elder son in the parable, jealous and unappreciative. Only those who have sinned can understand and appreciate the bliss of redemption.

This means your restlessness is not a failure. It is part of the process. The Hindus represent the evolution of man as a circle. Starting at the top, he falls, instinctively and unconsciously, to the bottom. From there he must climb up the second half of the circle and return in full consciousness to the point from which he began.

The ego cannot pull itself out

Watts says that although the return journey is done in consciousness, it is not done by consciousness, by the efforts of the self-conscious ego. This part of the journey is as natural as the development of a chrysalis into a butterfly. Any attempt to force this growth egotistically is like trying to open the chrysalis with tweezers. It only keeps us stuck in opposition to life.

You cannot think your way to happiness. You cannot plan your way to wholeness. You cannot optimize your way to enlightenment. The ego can no more extract itself from the conflict than a tooth can pull itself out of your jaw.

This is where Stoic wisdom becomes useful. The Dichotomy of Control is not just a management technique. It recognizes that the ego is not the boss. Some things are up to you. Some things are not. Fighting the things that are not up to you is the definition of misery.

Accepting the Conflict

Watts writes that the first step on the homeward journey is to understand that we have never actually been cut off from nature at all, that our present acute conflict with life is necessary, is part of a natural purpose and that self-consciousness is not a denial but a fulfillment of natural law.

This is difficult to accept. We want to believe that our suffering is a mistake. That if we just think better, plan better, try harder, we can fix it. But Watts says the conflict is not a mistake. It is part of the design. The tension between the self and the universe is not a flaw. It is how life becomes conscious of itself.

The second step arises naturally from the first. By accepting the conflict between itself and life as part of the nature of life, the ego begins to feel itself in harmony with the “dark” side of nature. For the conflict becomes unhappiness only through our desire to escape from it, which adds one tension to another.

When you accept the conflict, it stops being destructive. When you stop trying to escape from the tension, the tension becomes creative again. You can move through life like the earth orbits the sun, held by gravity and centrifugal force.

The Dapper Framework and Reinvention

I think about this whenever I read about personal transformation frameworks like the Dapper framework for reinvention. These frameworks are not the problem. The problem is when we think the framework will save us. When we think that if we just follow the right steps, we will never feel lost again.

But the feeling of being lost is part of the journey. The Prodigal Son had to hit bottom before he could come to himself. If you are in the middle of a difficult transition, that is not evidence that something is wrong. That is evidence that the process is working.

Practical Steps

Stop treating your anxiety as a failure. If you are anxious, that is not proof that you are doing life wrong. That is proof that you are human and that you care about something. The anxiety itself is not the problem. Resisting it is.

Notice when you are trying to force growth. If you are white-knuckling your way through a self-help program, or berating yourself for not progressing fast enough, you are opening the chrysalis with tweezers. Stop trying to force it. Let the process happen.

Practice the trial and error approach. Make a move, see what happens, and adjust. The people who suffer most try to get everything right on the first try. The people who thrive treat life as an experiment.

FAQ

Does this mean I should not set goals? No. It means you should set goals without making your happiness depend on them. You can want things. You can work for things. But do not tie your identity to the outcome. The Stoics called this the Dichotomy of Control. Focus on your actions, not the results.

What if I am in a genuinely bad situation? Accepting the conflict does not mean staying in a harmful situation. It means not adding the secondary suffering of resistance on top of the primary difficulty. You can change your circumstances and accept the difficulty of changing them at the same time. Both can be true.

How do I stop resisting my feelings? You cannot stop resisting by trying harder. You stop resisting by noticing the resistance. When you feel the urge to push away an uncomfortable emotion, just notice it. “I am resisting this feeling.” That noticing is the crack where the light gets in.

Is there a difference between acceptance and resignation? Yes. Resignation is giving up because you think nothing will change. Acceptance is facing reality because you want to work with it instead of against it. Watts is talking about acceptance. He is not talking about resignation.

The chrysalis opens in its own time. Your job is not to force it.