What Are You Trying to Control?

Money can buy choices. Success can create the illusion of certainty. Forgiveness can return stolen time. Perhaps adulthood is ultimately about learning what belongs in our hands and what does not.

Most of us spend the first half of our lives trying to acquire control.

We want control over money because we remember what it feels like not to have enough of it. We want control over our careers because dependence makes us uncomfortable. We want control over our health, our children’s futures, our relationships, our businesses, our reputations and, increasingly, even the way other people perceive us. We make plans, buy insurance, build savings, schedule medical tests, track investments, negotiate contracts and fill calendars months in advance. Much of adulthood is an elaborate attempt to make tomorrow slightly less capable of surprising us.

There is nothing foolish about this. Control, in reasonable quantities, is one of civilisation’s great achievements. Money protects us from certain forms of helplessness. Medicine gives us influence over illnesses that once decided our fate. Contracts create predictability between strangers. Savings create distance between a setback and catastrophe. A calendar allows hundreds of human obligations to coexist without collapsing into chaos. The desire for control is not necessarily neurotic. Often, it is simply what responsibility looks like.

The trouble begins when something useful quietly becomes a worldview.

Somewhere along the way, we begin to believe that if we plan intelligently enough, earn sufficiently, work diligently, anticipate every risk and make enough correct decisions, life will eventually become obedient.

It never does.

A phone call arrives. A diagnosis changes the vocabulary of a household. A relationship ends despite years invested in it. A business decision that appeared impeccable encounters circumstances nobody predicted. A parent who seemed permanently present suddenly becomes fragile. A child grows into a person whose choices cannot be made on their behalf. Someone we trusted disappoints us. Someone we underestimated succeeds. Someone who did everything correctly loses. Someone who behaved recklessly gets lucky.

Life keeps reminding us of something adulthood spends enormous energy trying to forget:

Influence is real. Control is partial.

Perhaps wisdom begins with learning the difference.

Money is an interesting place to begin because few things create a stronger sensation of control. Having money does matter. It can prevent inconveniences from becoming emergencies. It can purchase better healthcare, safer housing, education, mobility and time. It can allow a person to leave an abusive workplace, survive an unsuccessful venture, support an ageing parent or simply absorb the indignities that become much larger when every rupee is already spoken for.

But money’s most sophisticated use may not be purchasing things at all.

It may be purchasing choices.

There is a particular kind of wealth that does not photograph well. It is the ability to say, I don’t have to.

I don’t have to accept this assignment.

I don’t have to tolerate this client.

I don’t have to remain in this job purely because next month’s bills frighten me.

I don’t have to turn every available hour into income.

I don’t have to make this decision immediately.

That small sentence — I don’t have to — may be one of money’s greatest luxuries. It represents distance between circumstance and compulsion.

The highest return money can sometimes produce is not more money. It is greater authorship over your own time.

And yet this is precisely where the paradox begins.

We often acquire money by surrendering the very thing we eventually hope money will return to us.

Time.

We work longer because we want financial freedom later. We postpone holidays because the business is at a crucial stage. We miss dinners because this quarter matters. We answer messages during weekends because growth requires sacrifice. We reassure ourselves that the present intensity is temporary. There will be time after the promotion, after the expansion, after the loan, after the next milestone, after the children settle, after the portfolio reaches a certain number.

Later becomes one of adulthood’s most convincing currencies.

The problem is that later has no guaranteed exchange rate.

This does not make ambition misguided. Ambition can be magnificent. It can transform families, create institutions, employ thousands of people, produce art, solve problems and give a human being the deeply satisfying experience of discovering what they are capable of. There is nothing especially noble about refusing to strive.

But ambition becomes peculiar when we can no longer explain what the striving is supposed to make possible.

A person may spend twenty years building enough wealth to control his time and arrive there unable to spend an afternoon without feeling guilty. Another may create a company to escape employment and eventually become the most overworked employee in his own organisation. Someone else may accumulate enough assets to survive almost any financial emergency yet check the markets several times a day as though catastrophe is permanently approaching.

At that point the problem is no longer financial.

It is our relationship with control.

And control has another seductive side: success.

When life goes well for a sustained period, something subtle happens to memory. We begin editing the role circumstance played in our story.

The successful entrepreneur remembers the courage required to start but may gradually forget the client who took an early chance on him. The senior professional remembers years of hard work but may overlook the mentor who opened a door at precisely the right moment. We remember our discipline, intelligence and persistence because these belong to us. Timing, health, geography, family circumstances, colleagues, employees, accidents avoided and opportunities encountered are harder to incorporate into a heroic autobiography.

Success is particularly skilled at turning probability into personality.

If enough bets go our way, we begin believing we have mastered the game.

Perhaps that is why humility is most valuable precisely when life gives us the least reason to feel humble.

Humility is often misunderstood as thinking less of oneself. That is unnecessary. There is no virtue in pretending competence does not exist or apologising for achievement. Genuine humility is more intellectually demanding. It asks us to hold two truths simultaneously: I worked extraordinarily hard for this, and I did not control everything that allowed this to happen.

Both can be true.

You can deserve your success without believing you authored every condition that produced it.

This becomes easier to understand when fortune reverses because failure exposes the illusion much more brutally. Suddenly the same person who believed everything was controllable discovers how many variables never were.

And when control disappears, human beings frequently reach for blame.

Sometimes blame is justified. People betray us. Institutions fail. Partners break promises. Employees act dishonestly. Friends disappear when needed. Families wound one another in ways strangers rarely can. Compassion should never require intellectual dishonesty, and forgiveness should not be confused with permitting repeated harm.

But there is a strange feature of resentment that deserves more attention: it allows an event to continue exercising control long after the event itself has ended.

The conversation happened six months ago, but we are still rehearsing it in the shower.

The relationship ended three years ago, but an Instagram photograph can still rearrange an afternoon.

Someone humiliated us once, and we spend years fantasising about the day our success will make them regret it.

The person who injured us may have stopped participating in the conflict long ago. We continue it on their behalf.

Resentment is one of the few prisons in which the person who hurt us does not need to remain present for the sentence to continue.

This is where forgiveness becomes something more interesting than morality.

Forgiveness does not necessarily mean reconciliation. It does not require forgetting. It does not demand reopening a door that experience taught us to close. Sometimes the healthiest relationship with another person is distance.

Forgiveness can simply mean refusing to allow yesterday to continue deciding the emotional weather of today.

Seen this way, forgiveness is partly about control.

Not control over what happened.

Control over how much more of your life it is allowed to consume.

There are events we cannot undo. There are apologies we may never receive. There are people who will never understand the damage they caused because understanding it would require confronting something about themselves they are unwilling to see. Waiting for their recognition can become another form of dependence.

At some point, peace may require giving up the fantasy of a corrected past.

There are losses life imposes on us. And then there are the additional years we sometimes volunteer to those losses.

Perhaps this is why time sits quietly underneath almost every serious conversation about control.

Money matters because time is finite.

Health matters because time is embodied.

Relationships matter because time together expires.

Forgiveness matters because resentment consumes time.

Humility matters because success itself is temporary.

And ageing matters because eventually the abstraction becomes visible.

When we are young, five years feels like an accounting period. Later, five years acquires faces.

A child who was holding your finger is suddenly borrowing the car. Parents who once seemed indestructible begin asking you to accompany them to appointments. Friends who could once meet spontaneously now compare calendars several weeks ahead. The body starts negotiating terms that the mind did not remember agreeing to. Photographs acquire people who are no longer available for new photographs.

This is not melancholy. It is arithmetic.

There are fewer remaining Sundays at forty than there were at twenty. Fewer conversations with certain people. Fewer first days of school. Fewer family holidays in which everyone will be exactly the age they are today.

We do not need to know the number for the number to exist.

And perhaps that is when the desire for total control begins to look slightly strange. We spend enormous portions of finite lives attempting to make an inherently uncertain life predictable.

The irony is that many of the experiences we treasure most were never completely under our control in the first place.

We did not schedule the friendship that unexpectedly became important. We did not plan the conversation that changed our thinking. We could not have predicted every person we would love, every opportunity that would arrive, every failure that would redirect us or every accidental afternoon that would later become a cherished memory.

A perfectly controlled life might be remarkably safe.

It might also be unbearably small.

There is therefore a distinction worth making between control and capacity.

Control says: Nothing unexpected must happen.

Capacity says: When something unexpected happens, I want enough resources to meet it.

That may be a healthier purpose for money. Not to eliminate uncertainty, but to increase our ability to survive it.

It may also be a healthier purpose for physical strength: not to defeat ageing, but to preserve independence for longer.

A healthier purpose for relationships: not to guarantee that nobody leaves, changes or disappoints us, but to become capable of loving people without possessing them.

A healthier purpose for wisdom: not to predict every outcome, but to remain standing when prediction fails.

This changes the meaning of security.

Security stops being a world in which nothing goes wrong and becomes a self that does not collapse every time something does.

There is enormous freedom in that distinction.

Perhaps the question, then, is not how much control we can accumulate but what control is actually for.

Control over our money can create choices.

Control over our calendars can protect what matters.

Control over our habits can improve the probability of health.

Control over our attention can determine what occupies our minds.

Control over our responses can prevent somebody else’s behaviour from becoming our personality.

These are meaningful forms of agency.

But controlling whether people love us, whether children become exactly what we imagined, whether businesses always succeed, whether bodies remain young, whether relationships remain unchanged, whether other people understand us correctly, whether fortune behaves fairly, whether everyone recognises our intentions — these may be negotiations in which reality never signed the contract.

Adulthood may therefore contain two entirely different disciplines.

The first is learning to take responsibility for what is ours.

The second is learning to release what never was.

We spend enormous effort learning the first. We build careers, savings, routines, reputations and contingency plans. Perhaps the second takes longer because surrender feels suspiciously like defeat.

But surrender and defeat are not the same thing.

Sometimes surrender is simply accurate perception.

It is recognising the boundary between influence and omnipotence.

It is working hard without believing effort guarantees outcome. Loving deeply without believing love grants ownership. Saving carefully without believing money abolishes mortality. Planning intelligently without demanding that life honour the itinerary.

It is enjoying success while remembering how much of the universe had to cooperate.

It is surviving disappointment without allowing the person or event responsible to permanently occupy your inner life.

And perhaps this is where the idea of “enough” returns, but differently.

Enough is not merely a financial number.

Perhaps enough is the point at which we have built sufficient capacity that we no longer need to spend every waking hour trying to control what happens next.

Enough money to have choices.

Enough perspective to tolerate uncertainty.

Enough humility to acknowledge luck.

Enough compassion to understand human imperfection.

Enough self-respect to establish boundaries.

Enough forgiveness to stop carrying what has already happened.

And enough awareness of time to know that a life spent trying to secure life completely may eventually become a life we forgot to live.

There will always be another contingency to prepare for. Another number that might make us safer. Another opinion we could attempt to manage. Another possibility we could worry about. Another future version of ourselves for whom we could postpone something today.

Control can become an infinite project.

A life cannot.

Perhaps the purpose of gaining greater control over our lives was never to eventually control everything.

Perhaps it was to become secure enough, capable enough and wise enough to recognise what genuinely belongs in our hands — and finally peaceful enough to release what never did.

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This post was previously published on Dr. Sheetal Nair’s blog.

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