[541] Emergency Break

When and why do we think we’re in control?

As with many things, my thoughts initially shoot towards religion and the phrase, “Give it up to God.” Being a confused and afraid mammal who has habituated the experience of random violent death for centuries, it’s easy to see the psychological necessity in couching your disposition in something grander than you. Feeling responsible is a stressful burden that has little to do with keeping alive and getting on.

I’ve done some reading on the randomness. By virtue of your birth year or place you can fall reliably into all sorts of categories you might insist were yours to choose. I very much think control is mostly an illusion. The issues being, why is it such a powerful illusion, why do we seem to prefer it, and what would it look like were it true that we actually did control anything?

Sickness seems the first and obvious culprit in seeking out control. You can draw a causal line from feeling sick and a treatment that makes you better. Fear can accompany being sick especially depending on the degree. So exhibiting control can reduce anxiety. Finding control can help you feel empowered. It’s not hard to imagine why someone enjoys feeling powerful.

Zeroing in on that sick person though, are they in control? They couldn’t stop themselves from getting sick. (No secret, they won’t stop themselves from dying either.) They didn’t invent the life-saving drugs or surgery. In the U.S. they might not even be able to pick their doctor or whether they have insurance. They didn’t design their immune system or generally structure the environment in which they live and work that might beget specific illnesses.

As well, despite myriad meditative claims to the contrary, they don’t usually control their predisposition. Some people are prone to freaking out, breaking out, or hyperventilating. Some will get grossly depressed. If they try to distract themselves, the annoyance only feels louder. The more words of encouragement, the harder the pain throbs. You feel the anger grow, the sadness wears on you. Given the opportunity to speak you can give an itemized account of how this universe is designed to fuck you. Over enough time you genuinely opine on the relief you’d feel if you died.

They call it “practicing medicine.” Just as you practice and interpret law. The wiser professions know there is no uniformity, reliability, or control. Sometimes the medicine doesn’t take, sometimes you can’t find a judge on a sympathetic day, so learn how to accept. And perhaps there’s the bridge into the more important attempt at behavior. Are we “accepting” anything?

Once more into the religious breach! Because what happens when you don’t accept the Word of God? Eternal hellfire. Setting yourself to the task of rationalizing incoherent contradictions and myths is of eternal importance. You’re so infinitely not in control, that if you refuse to accept and repent your sins, the punishment will never end. It’s an amazing analogy.

So you’re not in control and desperate to accept. How might you reach acceptance? You might be familiar with the stages of grief. You might dip into the philosophy of the stoics. You might just get so bored and exhausted exposing yourself to an idea that you couldn’t be bothered to care anymore if your very life depended on it. Is one method to be prefered over the other? Are they overlapping habits all to do with the business of accepting? These questions aren’t really my concern though.

Certainly it seems we are very wrong-headed in thinking we control the world “outside.” I don’t know what diseases are waiting for me left behind from the unwashed masses. But we seem to get a fair amount of positive feedback in controlling each other. The battered-wife of my blogs deserves a raise for how often I employ her. We shift entire generations into specific fields and habits through school or the military. There seems to be something funky about consciousness that suggests malleability through intention. Yell “stop!” to someone running at you, they often might, while the boulder rolling down the hill flips you off as you get squashed.

As a point of frustration then, the times when they don’t stop charging at you are when we employ the cliches and pay the deferences. “Well, he plum knocked me over! I’m so small in comparison. Nothing I did was going to change this outcome.” The phrase, “I can understand the reasons, I don’t accept the actions” might be relayed. It’s only when you attempt to provide an absolute answer that you slant towards “rationalization” over deeper appreciation for the forces at play. When you need something concrete, it seems acceptance, let alone control, is forever off the table.

We seem to talk a lot about being accepted. As a social animal, not having a place where people engage with or celebrate things about you leads to anything from developmental issues to entire breakdowns of government. We want to be accepted for our “faults” and “differences.” We want someone to fall deeply in love with us at our worst, so when we bestow our best, we’ll know they deserve it. Acceptance is the gateway to an imagined perpetual bliss. Or, maybe not imagined, depending on how hard and fast you’re willing to accept things, per a stoic prescription.

It’s muddy when we, again need, to be accepted by someone who isn’t having it. In some way or another I’m sure the next 100 blogs will tie into my experience with a long-term relationship. I very much knew why I wasn’t a relationship person and had to have this one sort of creep up on me. People seem incapable of treating me beyond a certain way. I’m a novelty. I’m very fun until I’m very annoying. I’m very smart until I’m extremely exhausting. Now, I don’t find this a problem, the vast majority of people do. I’ve accepted that. I feel I have very little control over my disposition that I don’t pair with phrases like “killing my soul.”

And I had the naive thought that I would resolve myself to returning to a place of safe hedonism. At base, I am an idealist. I look up to a world I would prefer and relationships that feel empowered and flourishing. I’d rather have an honest superficial relationship than a grotesque obscure scar to pick at and redefine to suit poor judgmental ends. This often results in people “ghosting” me or dropping out of my life. They’re still “normal” and think if we don’t “progress” into some kind of long term emotional commitment, we’re just irresponsible abusive whores with nothing to gain.

It seems like if this is to be expected, I’d rather the people I eventually piss off or scare away to be “friends” instead of people I invest years of my life with. For me, the calculation is pretty clear. I need to invite less people into my life, for less amounts of time, to keep me on a path for how I can come to accept them. It’s in your favor for me to treat you like a liar. It’s with due consideration for our relationship that I upset you in the way that I upset you. I’m not going to be accepted by anyone who isn’t an annoyingly thoughtful quasi-sociopath, and that’s okay.

Mind you, the only reason it’s okay is because for over 12 years now I’ve talked out my relationship to life to in general. I know how to counter or engage different styles to the point of boredom. It’s a better story when there’s “drama” from a misstep. There’s potential from emotional fodder to provoke angles on blogs. I may not be able to control when the other person decides I’m no longer novel or worth the “effort,” but I’ve already written the story of our time together. At that point, where I tend to see a difference, is whether or not we accept a totality, not inevitability, of outcomes.

Less abstractly, if I delete you on facebook, I’m good to pick up where we left off if you text me. If the last time we talked it was some kind of blow out, most often 20 minutes later I’m over it and just wanting to grab lunch. If you find me an emotionless manipulative bastard who doesn’t listen and is completely inaccurate in my assessment of you, that’s okay, I just wish you’d accept that you can’t control me or how I relate that information anymore than I can control you. The only path is of mutual acceptance. The only road to acceptance is through active work to, actually, verses feeling like, understanding.

There’s the weird thing about consciousness. We do control our “effort.” We can make pains to swallow thorny fruit, or we can learn how to remove the barbs and keep the rewarding meal in tact. Much as I devoted like 7 or so blogs exploring the word “negative” when I thought I was unfairly labeled as such, it’s not that I disagreed that what I often have to say has little to do with all the beauty and magic I read about or experience in the world, it’s that if you regard my essence as a negative one, it’s a sign to me that you’re projecting. As a friend, I find a moral obligation in exploring where that judgment comes from. I’m one of the most hopeful and motivated idiots on the planet. Nothing I did would make sense were that not true.

Even when they grow to hate me, I send the drunk apologetic text. Even when I don’t believe in love, I stay with someone for years and write the sappy love letter. While I consider much of my family a mockery of the word, I’ll drag myself to “traditions” and hold my tongue about stepfamily exploits (at least to their faces). I don’t want 5 acres and a big house so I can sit and rot alone in cousin-fuck Indiana by myself. I don’t read about damn near everything in life unless I think I can discover ways to tie it together to actually help something. I don’t buy instruments I don’t want to learn, and I don’t unsettle friends I don’t wish everyday could figure out what it is they need to accept for us to better get along.

Ultimately, if you’re in doubt as to what or how to accept, draw from what you can’t. I can’t accept that “playing along” with conservative cliches and pleasantries helps anything or anyone. I can’t accept demonstrably destructive ideas, like ignorant blind faith, and either/or “reasoning.” I can’t accept that I’m as (fill in your judgment) as you think I am, and that means we can’t be friends. It’s a recipe for world peace if you go the opposite direction and allow yourself to understand someone. It doesn’t even have to be shared feeling and empathy. It doesn’t have to be on or with their terms. But there’s no truer indication you’ve learned to accept them than your own disposition. It’s your actual openness decreasingly described as a struggle. Your hopeful melancholy provoking jokes and laughter.

Until then, we’re all just beating each other up for things we’re angry we can’t control about ourselves. We’re unwilling to accept what we know or can learn, sacrificing for empty wishes and handed down ideals. At least for me, the decision to keep working towards that acceptance is always worth it. The random piles of shit that will be dropped on your head are inevitable. The constant misunderstanding and reimagining of conversations can be improved upon. You will die. Why waste your time degrading your self worth in pissing matches with people who are worth more? Why work so hard opposing yourself, foregoing the infinitely small, yet infinitely full of potential thing you can actually control?

What a waste.