Coming to terms with your inability to control your fate

You can’t control everything in your life and trying to will only make things worse.

Not being in control is stressful. Not knowing how things are going to turn out is scary. It would be nice if we could be assured of everything going our way. But that’s unrealistic.

The universe does not conspire to help you out. It doesn’t conspire to hurt you either. It’s not sentient so it doesn’t really think.

Other people do though. And they may or may not be trying to help you and a few of them may actually try to harm you for their own gain. That’s life. That’s what we all have to deal with. And some of us come into this life with a better hand and more privilege than others.

I’m not going to get into the subject of privilege here. What I want to talk about is how we best make do given the difficulties we have and the fact that we are going to have to work to get anything we want because – again, the universe isn’t going to magically provide for us.

The first step is to accept that reality. You don’t have control over everything in your life. You don’t’ have control over other people. You only have control of yourself and your choices. And your choices have an impact. In fact, your choices impact your future ability to make choices.

Each choice has a consequence. Those consequences can be good, bad or indifferent. While you can’t guarantee whether any given choice will result in a good outcome, you can change the odds to your favor and the cumulative effect of changing the odds slightly to your favor over the course of your life is astonishing.

Take for instance the choice to drive drunk or not.  Driving drunk doesn’t guarantee you will get in an accident. Driving sober doesn’t guarantee you will get to where you are going alive. All that choice does is change the odds – to your favor or against you.

You make hundreds of decisions every day. What to eat, who to have sex with, whether to have sex, etc. The cumulative impact of all those choices, either in your favor or against you – impacts the quality of your life. The more you choose to do things that improve your odds, the more likely good things will happen to you.

You don’t have a lot of control over what happens to you. But you do have some control. If you want to be successful, it would be stupid to leave your fate totally to chance.  Smart people make choices to improve their odds and they do this consistently throughout their lives.

If you want to learn more about how to exercise more control over your life and to improve your chances of success, however you define that, consider taking Planning for Personal Success – a Humanist Approach online course. Both of these will help you with your personal development.

Old habits are hard to break

Sometimes I drive on autopilot

The other day I was driving my son home from the local splash playground. We had intended to go to a fast food restaurant on the way home (don’t judge, we all do it). Unfortunately, instead of heading to the restaurant, I headed home. At several points, I reminded myself at the next intersection to turn around but I didn’t. I still headed home. Only after returning home was I able to reset my brain to drive to the restaurant.

I’m sure this has happened to you before. It happens to everyone. Even though you are aware and paying attention, you are still, to a certain extent, working on autopilot. This is the power of habits. The road I was on is a road I’ve only ever driven to go home. Every stimulus I encountered told me to continue on my course to home. My strong desire to override this habitual programming wasn’t sufficient to override my instincts.

We humans like to think we are in control of our behavior all the time. The reality is, our ability to control our behavior is limited especially when it comes to habitualized behavior. It can be very hard to override our established programming. 

So be patient with yourself and others whenever you do stupid things. Sometimes you just need to go home before your instinctual brain will allow your conscious brain to take over.   And sometimes, you may need professional help. 

Image: "High Speed Motion" by siraphat FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I Hate Hate

I was reminded again yesterday that I hate hate. I hate everything about that emotion.  I hate how it feels. I hate how it makes us want to act and I hate how it negatively impacts our society.

I hate that some people are so angry and hate filled that they indiscriminately kill other people. I even hate that the indiscriminate killing of other people makes me so angry I end up hating the people who kill.  I hate the senselessness of the whole thing. I hate feeling hate.

I’ve written before about turning hate into compassion. (see: http://humanisthappiness.blogspot.com/2010/01/turning-hate-into-compassion.html)  But what I want to say today, and what I teach my child when he is angry: is that it’s ok to feel the emotion. Just don’t act on it.

And I think that’s what I hate about hate the most. It’s an irrational emotion that is often overwhelming when we experience it. It robs us of our rationality.  We have to fight to regain a sense of balance so that we can act rationally and with compassion despite our anger and frustration and yes, hate.

To me part of being a good person is understanding that I have a moral obligation to control my emotions so that I do not negatively impact myself or others. I hate that not everyone cares enough to even try to control their emotions and I especially hate that not everyone is even capable of that level of self-control.  In short: I hate hate.  Thanks. I really needed to get that off my chest.

Circumstances Beyond Your Control

Ok - I write about the Humanist Approach to happiness, but lets be honest. It’s impossible to be happy all the time. Sometimes bad stuff happens that’s beyond our control. Whether it is an insane gunman killing random people at a rally, or it’s a sudden loss of a child, which just happened to a friend of a friend. Stuff happens and when that stuff happens, it is normal and natural to be upset by it.

So, how do we as Humanists cope? How do we reclaim our sense of hope and wonder and joy when the news is so depressing? Well, it isn’t easy. And, it takes time. And that’s ok. Again, you are not going to be happy all the time. And unfortunately, there is no magic wand you can wave to make all the sorrows and sadness in your life go away.

While I hate to gratuitously pitch my book, it does have an entire chapter about coping with grief so if you want to learn more about coping with those emotions, please get yourself a copy. What I want to focus on here is that the way back to happiness requires you to regain control of a situation that you had no control over. And the way you do that is to consciously make a decision to do so.

And in the meantime, while you are working at regaining control, there are some tricks to helping you calm your mind enough to focus on the task ahead of you. Whether you repeat the Serenity Prayer as your mantra or meditate, doesn’t matter. As long as you find a way to focus your energy productively despite your

Fear or Sanity

We Humanists are very big on reason.  It isn’t that we don’t honor our emotions; we just think that as fun as they can be – they aren’t always that reliable when it comes to decision-making.  Long story short, we respect our emotions and we allow them to have input, but we don’t let our emotions make our decisions for us.  We use our reason for that.

I bring this up because there has been a lot of fear mongering going on lately.  And making decisions based on fear usually doesn’t end well.  That is because fear tends to distort reality and making good decisions depends entirely on dealing productively with reality.  After all – you don’t want to do something stupid because you were too fearful to get your facts straight.

As a current example - one side of the health care debate is telling people that if they support health care reform – you or someone you love will die!  Pretty scary – but easily proven as lies.  There are plenty of perfectly rational reasons why you may or may not support health care reform.  Fear of death panels, rationing or the specter of socialism should not be amongst those reasons.