On a Sunday afternoon in October 1926, the greatest escape artist who ever lived died in a Detroit hospital bed. Harry Houdini had spent his career slipping out of handcuffs, straitjackets, and a nailed packing crate lowered into New York’s East River. He built a national reputation on the promise that no restraint could hold him. What killed him, in the end, was his own appendix (peritonitis), six days after a college student punched him in the stomach to test whether the great Houdini could really take a blow. (The story that the punch caused it is almost certainly legend and no doctor since has found a link.)
The man who thought he could control everything couldn’t escape the one thing going wrong in his body.
I’ve written before about the micromanager in the NY Times who was so much of a control freak that she cleaned out employees’ desks when she felt they were too messy and deleted email messages from their computers when she decided they didn’t need the notes anymore. It sure does sound like a plotline from The Office. Embarrassingly, I’ll admit to engaging in similar “tidying up” tactics with people in my family who don’t, let’s just say, ever prioritize cleaning up their surroundings, and who do not worship the Zero Inbox the way I do.
I know I belong to a tribe of well-meaning but can’t-help-ourselves planners who feel that if the world just followed our instructions, it would be a better place.
We control far less of it than we think, but convince ourselves it’s the other way around. In 1975, the psychologist Ellen Langer ran a series of experiments and gave the feeling a name: the illusion of control. People threw dice harder when they wanted high numbers. They charged more for a lottery ticket if they had picked it themselves rather than been handed one.
We behave as though our effort can bend pure chance, because on some level we find it ludicrous to think it can’t.
Which is why, for people like me, perfectionism becomes a trap. We believe we have to do everything ourselves because we’re the only ones who can do it perfectly, and then we get stressed and overwhelmed when we struggle to get it all done.
“You can do anything, but not everything,” David Allen wrote, seemingly directed at me. It's easy for me to decide what to do (everything); I only struggle when I have to decide to let others do something, even if it’s as petty as letting someone else fold the towels the wrong way.
And so the to-do list grows a mile long until we can’t fathom how to tackle any of it, and the next best thing becomes scrolling through your phone instead. Tina Fey has a word for this state. “Blorft,” she calls it: completely overwhelmed but proceeding as if everything is fine, reacting to the stress with the torpor of a possum. I have been blorft more weeks than I would like to admit. I blame some of it on what my culture drilled into me.
We were taught that if we aren’t hard on ourselves, we’ll turn lazy and self-indulgent. But a meta-analysis of more than 16,000 people found that self-compassion is associated with lower stress and higher well-being, not more sloth.
One version of control does work, though. Years ago, I wrote about the locus of control (how much we believe we steer the events of our lives). The summary of that argument is this: Control your actions, but not your outcomes. The way to do this is to maintain an internal locus of control over what we do, and an external one over the results that may arise.
I’m choosing to eat right and exercise, but I know I could still get hit by a car on the way to the gym. Research bears out that feeling some agency over our actions (and actions alone, not outcomes) makes us less helpless and, on the whole, happier.
Most of what I try to manage isn’t out in the world anyway. It’s the audience in my head, the imagined version of everyone whose opinion is like a standing council in my mind.
I’m beginning to notice the difference between the things I can actually move and the things that were never under my control. I still worship the Zero Inbox. I still reach to straighten the towels. But I’m getting a little better at doing my part and then, with as much grace as I can manage, waving the white flag to the universe, sometimes with a smile, sometimes kicking and screaming, sometimes in resignation.
I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened. Mark Twain