Circle of control

This is Jared Dillian taking a brief detour in a post about Resentment.

I want to take a brief detour here and talk about how unproductive it is to try to control the entire universe with our minds. We worry about bad things happening, thinking that if we worry hard enough, that if we pray for a bad outcome, then it won’t happen. We resent other people, thinking that if we resent them hard enough, they’ll change and we will get what we want. Virtually all forms of non-heritable mental illness come from a desire to control other people and our surroundings. Virtually all forms of non-heritable mental illness come from an inability to accept other people and the world as they are. You can’t control your kid dropping out of college. You can’t control your husband letting out a loud fart when he gets out of bed in the morning. You can’t control the county when they hand you a property tax increase. You can’t control the airport that just rerouted flight patterns over your house. You can’t control who becomes president. The number of things you actually can control is shockingly small. You take the action, and you leave the results up to somebody else. That’s how this game works. Read this paragraph a few times. If you understand it and internalize it, you will never need a therapist again

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Mike again, I just love that framing, control the entire universe with our minds. Right out of Maxims for Thinking Analytically.