Are You Using Your Work to Control Risk and Avoid Pain

Recently I’ve been giving thought to humanity’s problem with control and risk avoidance.

To be honest, I’ve been uncomfortably confronted by my own love of control. In the past several days I've had five different clients cancel appointments at the last minute. Whether it was for legitimate reasons or not, it did something to me. I was understanding and nice in my text messages and emails, but in my heart I was a jerk and that made me take a hard look at my/our preoccupation with making life safe and predictable.

Having some control over the ups and downs of life seems to be at the heart of most of human actions. If you look closely you’ll find our control needs driving our politics, our choice of jobs, where we decide to live, the schools we choose for our kids and more. Just about everything we do seems to be connected, at some level, to our efforts to control life.

For example, the Work Values Exercise I give career clients has forty-one different items listed as potential choices but Making Money and Job Security are most often in the top five items selected by most of my clients. When I ask why these were important to them (and I always want to know why people choose what they do), they invariably tell me something like “I just don’t want to have to worry about my life”. I’ve had dozens of conversations with parents of my client-students who are insistent that I direct their child toward careers that have higher pay and lower risk when the economy turns sour.

Controlling life by preventing perceived calamities and limiting risk seems to sneak insidiously into the most mundane decisions in our lives. But it’s based on an assumption that we can anticipate all of the negative turns life can take AND that we have some power to protect ourselves from the unexpected.

Some friends and I recently read and discussed Finding God by Dr. Larry Crabb. In the book Dr. Crabb posits that most people don’t really want a relationship with God, they just want some protections from a chaotic, unpredictable and dangerous world. In fact, he goes further, saying that even if we think God exists our actions suggest that many of us don’t trust that God is powerful enough, loving enough or actively involved enough in our lives to protect us from life’s negative events. We become what author Brennan Manning called “functional atheists”, professing a belief in God but living to protect ourselves from the world.

Ironically, Crabb also presents the idea that maybe God’s love is one that has a higher, more intelligent view of our lives. That kind of love would perceive the purpose and character-changing power of life’s negative events to make us into something grander and better than we could be without these trials. That perspective would incorporate difficulties, challenges and even pain into the paths of our lives for the purpose of growth. Such a view would encourage us to not control or avoid life’s difficulties but to welcome them and in some ways even seek them out. (There are healthy and unhealthy ways one might do this. Contact me if you're curious.)

If this year-plus of the Covid pandemic has taught us anything it’s that we are laughingly outmatched in our attempts to control life and protect ourselves from calamity. Life is not a simple linear equation where we can ensure or prevent outcomes by simply putting the right pieces in place; it is an embodiment of chaos theory where myriad factors we can’t even imagine can turn one person’s common cold symptoms into another’s month on a ventilator or death.

If controlling life to protect ourselves from negative events is foolish beyond a certain point, then how should we live?

First, far greater minds than mine have wrestled with this question in the fields of philosophy, theology and metaphysics, and I am unqualified to present an answer that would meet their intellectual criteria. I’m just a career coach, so my perspective is informed, for better or worse, by my work of helping my clients find work that fits them and the aspirations they have for their lives. With that said, here is my take on our battle with control:

“The only rules that really matter are these: What a man can do and what a man can’t do.”

Some may recognize this as a quote by the character Captain Jack Sparrow in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. (I guess wisdom sometimes comes from strange places.) I’ve used it so many times with clients that it’s almost cliché, but I believe it holds a simple truth that we’d be wise to adopt.

If life is, in fact, an embodiment of chaos theory and there are far too many factors at work for us to ever control in the name of protecting ourselves, then perhaps we are better served by turning our attention to those things in the present moment that we can affect. Things like the nature of our interactions with people during our day, the words we choose, the attitudes we let color our perceptions and our thoughts in present moments – these choices are things within our individual control. In contrast, protecting ourselves from things imagined, that may or may not ever become real, seems a foolish use of our energies.

Perhaps we’d all be better off by embracing the words of The Teacher in Ecclesiastes 3:22: “So I saw that there was nothing better for a person than to enjoy their work, because that is their lot. Who can bring them to see what will happen after them?”

In other words, don’t make choices about work and life based on protecting yourself and controlling life but focus on finding enjoyment in the days and work that you’re given. (For some that means first finding the work they were created to carry out.)

Then, if you’re lucky, you might join the voices of Simeon in Luke 2 or the legendary jazz musician John Coltrane and say, “Nunc dimittis” (I could die happy now) in a joyful contentment with our work that transcends simply making a living or protecting us from life.

Just a thought.