Control

What do we yearn as human beings the most? In one word, it is control. Let’s talk today about the psychology of control and how we can leverage it.

“I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.”
― Criss Jami

Today’s article starts with a story of two fictional people, A and B (No names or genders assigned to either, because people are extremely smart and tend to draw inferences from where they shouldn’t). A is an introvert, has been most of their life. B, on the other hand, is an ambivert. They, by the games of fate, started to talk to each other, and started liking it too. The amount of time they invested in these conversations grew over time.

At this stage, it’s safe to say that there exists a relationship between the two individuals. All seems good when we look at it from the outside.

Very recently, I learnt about how some things can be quantified as they are, however, others cannot. The relationship, in this scenario, cannot be quantified as it is. In order to quantify this relationship, I’ll use a metric called “degree of involvement”, which must be self-explanatory (If not, feel free to bombard my comments section with questions about it). Continuing with the story, A exhibits a higher degree of involvement as compared to B, which seems understandable, given their personality which can be extrapolated to interactions with fewer people.

A starts to get frustrated over the little things that happen everyday, dwelling about what they shouldn’t, while B has no idea about it, apart from a little observation that A’s behavior has changed slightly. (What little things? Everything about the relationship that these two people share which are not as per A’s expectations.). The latter wonders and wonders and wonders as to what changed, but to no avail. To B, it’s all the same, but to A everything seems different.

A started losing their grip about the little things that happened. Thoughts started creeping in A’s mind, which they hadn’t experienced before. Consequently, A stopped talking to B altogether in order to preserve their peace of mind (I know the sighs I hear, “Boy, that escalated quickly!”. I know, happy endings just aren’t the thing I am good at creating). Now, did A do the right thing? Who was at fault? I don’t know.

If I could put across a question, what changed? Why does the same thing look different to A and B? To me, it looks like A felt they were losing control. And that’s what we fear the most.

Human beings consider themselves to be rational beings. I tend to disagree. Human beings are rationalizing beings. We are adept at making ourselves extremely excited or even upset about the stupidest things while staying indifferent to the less stupid things. What’s even more interesting is we don’t even notice what’s important for us and what’s not. We get elated at the news of the party while we know we have an exam coming up 2 weeks later. We get excited about going to watch a movie while we know we have a paper to submit just around the time of its release. We get excited about eating junk food at the weekends while we should be hitting the gym.

And the funny thing about it is, we rationalize it! “Oh, I’ve got 2 weeks, I’ll cover the ground easily”. “Oh, the paper is due, but I can do it after the movie, it’ll end at 2 AM, but I can pull an all-nighter”. “I go to the gym enough, I deserve a cheat day”, these are few of the things that I tell myself on a constant basis. I know, all the things I’ve mentioned here have little to no impact on our lives in the long-term. However, this mentality is a foundation stone for more serious repercussions including but not limited to substance abuse, suicides and depression.

Now, the obvious question is, how should we go about solving this problem? Please note, I am in no way, shape or form saying that this is a full proof method, or I have the cure for depression. But the simple solution to me seems, not caring. Not caring doesn’t mean indifference. Not caring means realizing where we have control and where we don’t. I love Thanos’ dialogue at the end of The Avengers, “Fine, I’ll do it myself”. This is a really great way to live life. Stop caring where there is nothing to control. It’ll have to work it out on its own, and even if it doesn’t there is no room for us to take any action. We can’t control the results of our exams or the grade that we’ll get on the paper, what we can control is the effort that we put in to study. We can’t control the amount of muscle we build or the amount of body fat we lose, what we can control is the consistency we can maintain by going to the gym and not falling for the temptation of the cheat meal (which turns into a cheat day, then week, then month.. well, the picture should be clear).

I started off by saying that A and B are fictional characters. For the readers who stuck till here, A and B aren’t really fictional and I know one of them.

While both A and B must be feeling bad as of now (if not, welcome to the sociopath club! :P), it’s better to stay this way, because over time, they’ll both realize that neither A nor B would’ve lived happily with the sense of insecurity that they had, A with inadequacy and B with confusion. Had they focused on what they themselves could do, I believe the problem had not risen in the first place.

This is an attempt at a new form of articles that I tried, please do let me know if it’s better or worse as compared to my previous ones. Thanks for reading, Peace!

-Vibhu Vyas