The Need For Control is a Source of Suffering

I often ask people why they don’t have kids. This is a personal kind of sanity check to make sure I have adequate responses the next time my mom asks me about it.

One of the most common answers I hear is: ’“Why would I bring a child into this world?”

Well, what sort of world are we exactly referring to here? We’re not living in a dystopian Blade Runner type of future. Maybe we’re just afraid of how our priorities would change if we did have children?

Something that you can’t easily conceptualize, like having children, isn’t a cogent topic that people can understand without having experienced it in the first place. If you want to have kids, your life often follows a predictable trajectory before you can have children i.e. go to school, get a job, get my promotion, make a six-figure salary, be in a stable relationship with someone I love, and then I can perhaps consider the possibility of having a child.

When speaking of a society like the United States, the possibility of having children seems like a distant goal on the horizon to most millennials. We prioritize finding the ideal partner and finding an existentially fulfilling career before we can even consider bringing another human into this world.

Just like falling in love, having children can result from an unplanned event outside of our planned life trajectory, something like serendipity. Things like this that are outside of our control can sometimes bring us happiness in unexpected ways.

Let’s take my friend Alex as an example.

Alex lived his life from one day to the next, with no plans for the future, working the odd job to make ends meet. After meeting a nice girl on Tinder, he inadvertently got her pregnant 7-months later.

Going the abortion route would have returned his life to its mundane normalcy, but his partner insisted on keeping the baby. Over the course of a few months, Alex’s priorities had shifted, and so did his life.

In Alex’s case, external factors ended up reshaping his life for the better, as he now has something meaningful to live for. He decided to take up a stable job to financially support his new family. He started seeing a future for himself that was all too absent for his entire life. He is now trying to be the best father he can be.

His plan was never to have the child in the first place because his brain could only equate having a child to the end of his current identity, something that was essentially like venturing into the unknown. He could only perceive this as danger, the end of his known identity.

People go on living their entire lives making the worst decisions for themselves out of fear. Fear is subjective, yet its outcome in such a scenario is very much the same. That is to say that the fear of uncertainty is what makes us grow accustomed to our own suffering. You could be in a terrible job or relationship, but you accept it, like someone being stuck in the crossfire of an unwanted destiny.

Henry David Thoreau encapsulated this form of regret by stating:

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.

The reason something like a mid-life crisis has become a cultural meme is that it becomes painfully clear, through the realization of the finitude of our own existence, that we’ve been acquiescing to suffering our entire lives. The mid-life crisis is often marked by a change in behavior and newly adopted attitude of risk-taking.

This narrative is so common that we see it often played out in culture. In action movies there is often a final scene where the main character knows he’s about to die, so he calls his family to tell them he loves them. (Spoiler Alert: This happened at the end of the most recent James Bond movie). People with near-death experiences know the feeling of having their attitude towards life suddenly and drastically change for the better after their close encounter with dying.

Such experiences shed light on what’s truly important i.e. our most visceral motivations. We want a million things all the time, however, a sick man only wants one thing: to be healthy again.

Since most of us are either unaware of what drives our motivation or what we want out of life, we choose familiar forms of suffering that give us the kind of predictability that we crave. Most people are unwilling to consciously make the choice of having children in order to give much needed structure and meaning to their lives (understandably so).

People are often very shitty at deciding what’s best for themselves. Whether this is the best type of person to date, the habits to engage in, or the ideal type of career we pursue. We choose things that mitigate sources of unknown suffering (Having a child would be the end of my life) to choose suffering that we are more familiar with (I hate my job, but at least it’s a hate I’m familiar with).

The greatest source of our own suffering is unknowingly self-inflicted, and the attempt to remedy our pain by being in full control of our own destiny causes greater anguish. At the same time, we have another greater kind of anxiety, that is the one marked by unrealized potential, what could be?

Types of Existential Worry

Soren Kierkegaard classified these two types of suffering as being lost in the finite and infinite. Someone who is lost in the finite is one who chooses familiar suffering like the 9–5 job that they hate. It’s possible that they would excel as a schoolteacher or an artist, yet this is something that remains unrealized due to their conscious choice to go on suffering in the only way they are familiar with.

On the other hand, someone who gets lost in the infinite is the person who is literally unable to make a choice because of all the options presented to them. This is the person who never reaches their potential because they don’t want to commit themselves to any one path out of the fear that they are making the wrong choice and missing out on a better option.

In both scenarios, the existential crisis that ensues is a result of our own choice; most of the time this poor choice is attributed to a lack of information about the options that are available to us.

What Can We Do About Being Bad Decision-Makers?

Speaking to a number of friends who went through quarter-life crises during the pandemic, I realized the contradictory nature of finding happiness through the attempt to control every aspect of life. Anxiety inevitably ensues when we try to control every variable in our lives, yet are faced with an abundance of choice (getting lost in the infinite), rendering us unable to make a choice due to the fear of squandering it.

We believe that we’re fully in control of our own destiny, that if we work hard enough we can make our dreams come true. While this is partly true, I’d argue that the need to be in control, or rather, the lack of acceptance that most things are outside of your control is a source of suffering in itself.

A lot of people after the pandemic are starting to realize that they made some pretty poor choices in their lives. I’m not exactly sure why we’re experiencing this now, however, many of us are collectively experiencing a shift of priorities in our lives from an external factor similar to what Alex experienced.

Although remote work and technology is somewhat liberating, it’s become painfully obvious that it cannot supplant the need for intimacy.

Technology cannot cure our social ills, and neither can any enticing self-help book.

This brings me to the point of this blog post. The priorities of our lives, the things that dictate the decisions we make, are often influenced by that which we find meaningful i.e. the best way to spend our lives. However, what we find meaningful is often due to factors that lie outside of our own control.

Meaning, something that has become a more prized commodity than gold in today’s economy, is not something that you can create intentionally. It comes up in the places where we least expected it. You cannot control everything in your life, or your future for that matter.

You cannot explain why you are interested in certain things, and not in others. Why someone prefers blue over red may be due to some childhood experience with a blue car, or their mere genetics. It’s difficult to say, yet we are the puppets living out destinies that have already been created for us. To do this is to follow that which gives you a reverberating feeling of purpose.

Viktor Frankl made an important discovery using logotherapy in Man’s Search for Meaning, namely that every human being needs a purpose to live for. As Nietsche said:

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

While this is absolutely true, the ideal seems increasingly untenable in today’s digital age. Let me explain why:

1. The Why is Obfuscated by Attention Hijack. It’s no secret that the most prized resource in our economy is attention, not money. The pandemic has accelerated this to the point of making us realize that there is a mental health crisis going on due to the lives we live online removed from the present. Trying to figure out what you want in this world is increasingly difficult when others are constantly obsessed with influencing your opinion for their own monetary gain. Everybody is trying to tell you who they want you to be; namely, a consumer. Hell, even I’m trying to get you to consume (read) this article right now.

2. The Why is Often Confused with the Whys of Others. We see the story of the successful YouTuber who quit their job as a janitor to make documentaries about WWII. I’m not saying this isn’t possible, but recent studies have shown that making a living in the creator economy is more difficult than we might think. We often think that becoming successful by following the paths of others is our ticket to freedom. We are wrong.

People like having the freedom of choice taken from them because it releases one from the anxiety of debilitating choices that we are forced to make, like what career path we embark on, or who we end up marrying. These are all big decisions that we cannot simply make in one moment. There are infinite possibilities of where we could go after that.

I touched upon free-will briefly in an earlier article because it is important to note that while free-will doesn’t exist, decisions still matter. Decisions create cascading effects that impact our life down the line. What we are doing here now, is all a product of deterministic factors that led your life to where it is right now.

There is a paradox here. We often want certainty in our lives, and try to force these outcomes into existence. However, the very act of forcing something into existence has a debilitating effect on the mind.

My mentor once told me the story of a frog while he was on a camping trip in Spain. Upon seeing a frog close to the river, his friend attempted to catch it, only having the frog jump through his fingers with each passing attempt. After the fifth or sixth time, my mentor suggested placing his hand next to the frog and waiting. Rather than running from the danger, the frog eventually climbed onto the hand that was previously trying to capture it.

Our aversion to anxiety often pushes us to the point of forcefully obtaining desirable outcomes in our lives. Whether we’re trying to catch a frog, or find the ideal match, we often fail to see that the greatest obstacle in the way is ourselves.

Forcing yourself to wake up at 4am because you watched a video of a former Navy seal telling you “discipline equals freedom” is not a guaranteed way to change your life for the better. Neither is just meditating by itself. Both of these habits help, but they aren’t they aren’t a clear-cut method to solving the deepest worries of our lives.

These habits build off of the idea that there is an inner bitch that needs to be eliminated for the birth of a stronger and better you. How do you tell someone that what they have is already good enough, and that there is no need for this better idealized version.

Chasing the ideal is not a futile effort, yet feeling the need to constantly improve is like forcefully trying to catch the frog. We try to use technology in this way to also forcefully capture the frog by projecting the best image of ourselves into the outside world to improve our careers and social lives.

There is a general level of anxiety that pervades our society to its core, and this anxiety has fueled innovation and progress in many different industries. Yet we are reaching a point in our age where this is no longer necessary, rather following on the belief that if we were good enough already, there would be no need to change ourselves.

The change you crave comes in acceptance of things beyond your control.