The Control Bargain

On truth, death, consciousness, and my apparently lifelong need to understand the operating system before agreeing to use it.

Maybe I’m not always searching for truth because I want to know more. Maybe sometimes I’m searching because I still believe enough understanding will eventually give me control.

I was having a conversation with a woman recently who I really don’t know very well, and somehow, as conversations with me have a tendency to do, we ended up talking about history, religion, consciousness, conspiracies, the stories we’ve been handed as a society, and how much of what we have been taught has been distorted, sanitized, manipulated, rewritten, politicized, or simply repeated long enough that everyone eventually stopped asking where the story came from.

At some point she looked at me and said, essentially, “Okay, but what’s the point of knowing all of that? What are you going to do about it?”

I remember thinking that was an interesting question, and then I woke up early the next morning still thinking about it, which is usually when I know something has gotten under my skin, because seriously, what is the point?

Let’s say I spend years digging into early Christianity and discover that the version of Jesus most of us inherited is dramatically different from some of the historical and mystical traditions that existed around him, then keep going into Gnosticism, ancient civilizations, human origins, consciousness, institutional power, American history, world history, and all the places where the story becomes considerably messier once you stop accepting the textbook version. Great, now I know more. But then what? I’m still going to die, and so is the guy who never questioned any of it.

I mean, there is no cosmic prize for correctly reconstructing human history before you die, no certificate waiting at the finish line congratulating me for finally figuring out what Constantine was really up to in 300 something AD, and granting me access to the upgraded afterlife. If death is sitting at the end of the hallway either way, what does knowing actually accomplish?

“If death is sitting at the end of the hallway either way, what does knowing actually accomplish?”

That was the question I thought I was asking, it turns out I was pulling on an altogether different thread entirely.

The Thread

At first I thought I was asking about truth, then I thought I was asking about meaning, and eventually I realized I might actually be asking about control, which, for anyone who knows me particularly well, is both annoyingly predictable and actually kind of funny (insert all my former lovers google reviews).

I have always possessed this insatiable desire to understand the architecture underneath things. Give me a business, a relationship, a brand, an identity, a religion, a piece of history, or some other system that refuses to satisfy me with the surface explanation… anything, really, and my brain almost immediately wants to know what is underneath it, what is actually running the thing, and whether there is some thread connecting everything that appears disconnected.

“What is actually running this thing?”

That instinct became a career for me, it is essentially what I do with people now if I had to dumb it down for you.

But there is obviously a shadow side to it too, because if I can understand the architecture, perhaps I can predict the behavior; if I can predict the behavior, perhaps I can make the right decision; and if I make the right decision, perhaps I can produce the outcome I want.

Keep following that logic long enough and somewhere underneath all this noble truth-seeking is a much more human bargain: Give me enough understanding and maybe I’ll finally feel safe inside reality.

“Give me enough understanding and maybe I’ll finally feel safe inside reality.”

Well, shit… now we are getting somewhere.

Because I think I have made some version of that bargain most of my life. Understand the business well enough and perhaps I can control the outcome.

Understand another person well enough and maybe I can keep the relationship safe.

Understand myself well enough and maybe I’ll stop making painful decisions.

Understand history, consciousness, God, human behavior and the nature of existence itself and perhaps eventually reality will hand me the fucking operating manual… and apparently I am willing to read all 900 pages.

The problem is that I’m increasingly convinced the manual doesn’t exist.

What Does Knowing Actually Buy You?

That is where the question became more interesting, because if knowledge cannot give me certainty, then what exactly does it give me?

The answer I keep coming back to is degrees of freedom.

If I cannot see my conditioning, I experience my conditioning as me. Someone criticizes me and I defend myself, someone leaves and I panic, somebody responds differently than I want and I start trying to convince them, my childhood hands me a definition of success and I spend thirty years pursuing it without ever realizing I inherited the assignment. My culture tells me what a good man, successful entrepreneur, father, husband, citizen or whatever else should look like, and I build accordingly while experiencing all of it as choice.

Awareness creates a little space between the programming and what I do next, and inside that space is something that starts looking a lot like freedom.

That is probably why so many traditions that disagree about almost everything eventually wander into strangely similar territory.

“Awareness creates a little space between the programming and what I do next, and inside that space is something that starts looking a lot like freedom.”

The Stoics distinguish between what happens and our judgment about what happens.

Buddhism keeps examining attachment and the mind manufacturing suffering.

Taoism warns us about our obsession with forcing reality.

Jung tells us to make the unconscious conscious.

The Gospel of Thomas repeatedly points the seeker inward.

Alan Watts spends a considerable amount of time laughing at the ego for trying to secure itself against a universe where absolutely everything is moving.

Different metaphysics, different centuries, different language, and still the invitation starts sounding remarkably familiar:

See what is operating you so that it does not have to keep operating you unconsciously.

Now knowledge has consequence, it does not make me immortal, but it may make the life I have more mine.

The Problem With Truth-Seeking

There is a shadow hiding here too, and I can see how easily I could fall into it because truth-seeking can become another way of standing outside your own life analyzing it.

There will always be another book, another theory, another hidden text, another ancient civilization, another interpretation of Jesus, another explanation of consciousness, another rabbit hole sitting there patiently with snacks. Eventually I have to ask whether I am examining reality because it helps me participate more intelligently in my life, or because every new revelation temporarily gives me the feeling that I am getting closer to finally controlling it.

It is considerably easier to investigate how civilization lies to itself than to investigate where I lie to myself.

The first one can make me feel expansive, the second one occasionally ruins lunch.

And this may be where history becomes most useful, because once you understand how easily human beings construct stories about reality, you eventually have to acknowledge that governments do it, religions do it, cultures do it, families do it, companies do it, and, unfortunately for the comfortable version of this conversation, so do I.

“It is considerably easier to investigate how civilization lies to itself than to investigate where I lie to myself.”

Memory edits, identity protects itself, fear writes remarkably convincing scripts, ego selects evidence, and we rewrite our own autobiographies constantly while criticizing institutions for doing essentially the same thing at scale.

So the most consequential discovery may never be simply, They gave me a distorted story, it may be… “Holy shit. I am also capable of confusing the story I constructed with reality itself,” and that is where truth-seeking finally gets its teeth.

Otherwise awakening can become another identity. You replace one dogma with another, one official story with an alternative story, one tribe with a more interesting tribe, and call the whole thing consciousness when you may have simply moved into a different cage with a better aesthetic.

The point, at least for me, cannot simply be accumulating better beliefs, it has to change the way I see.

The Control Bargain

All of this eventually brought me to the question I have apparently been circling in a hundred different forms throughout my life: where does my agency end and my desire for control begin?

Those two can look remarkably similar from inside the person exercising them.

I can work incredibly hard on a business, become better at communicating, choose relationships carefully, study myself, anticipate consequences, raise my children intentionally and learn everything available to me about a situation. All of that belongs to agency… then reality answers.

The market decides whether it cares. Another human being decides how they want to respond. My daughters reveal the lives they want to build. My body ages. Circumstances change. People leave. Something I believed would work does not. Something I never planned for suddenly appears, and there is the boundary.

Agency can give me authorship, it cannot give me omnipotence.

That may be one of the most annoying truths I have encountered because some part of me has spent years asking agency to do exactly that. Become capable enough and uncertainty will disappear. Understand enough and fear will leave. Make enough good decisions and reality will finally stop surprising you… apparently reality did not agree to those terms.

And perhaps this is why the question of truth kept turning into a question about existence itself. If I cannot know everything, cannot control everything, cannot even determine how long I am here, then what exactly am I supposed to do with the fact that I exist?

Why Should I Exist?

That became the next question, and it exposed the control bargain even more clearly.

Hidden inside “Why should I exist?” is the assumption that existence owes me some sort of justification. Explain the purpose, explain the suffering, explain consciousness, explain why I was born, explain why I have to die, explain what all of this is for, and once I understand the case well enough perhaps I can finally consent to existence.

The problem is that even if God appeared tonight and said, “Deevo, here is exactly why you exist,” I know myself well enough to know what would happen next. I would immediately have follow-up questions about why that purpose, why me, why reality was designed this way, why suffering exists, why consciousness exists and why any of us have to die… and somewhere around question seventeen, God would probably look at his watch and regret taking the meeting… Interestingly enough, ask any woman I’ve ever had a sleepover with and they do the same.

You can keep asking why until eventually you reach something that simply is, and I hate that answer because it removes negotiation.

But maybe that is the existential predicament. I arrived before the explanation did. So did you.

We woke up inside reality and immediately started trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Science is an attempt. Religion is an attempt. Philosophy is an attempt. Myth is an attempt. Spiritual traditions are attempts. The conversation I had with this woman was another attempt, and the conversation I had with myself the following morning was another.

Perhaps knowledge never finally solves existence.

Perhaps it increases the sophistication of our relationship with it, and that my friend is what keeps resonating with me because it leaves room for curiosity without requiring curiosity to eventually deliver some final cosmic answer.

Maybe We Are Measuring Life Wrong

I kept pushing the question because apparently accepting a reasonably good answer on the first pass would be wildly out of character.

If we all die anyway, why does any of this matter?

At some point I realized I had smuggled entrepreneurial logic into metaphysics. I was asking existence for the outcome, the deliverable, the return on investment, as though the universe had invited me into a strategic planning session and I was trying to establish whether consciousness was meeting its quarterly objectives.

Maybe the problem is buried inside the question.

A hammer has a purpose. A company has a purpose. A bridge has a purpose. I am less convinced life belongs in that category.

Alan Watts played with this beautifully when he described our tendency to treat life as a journey toward some destination instead of something more like music. You do not listen to a symphony because you are desperate to arrive at the final chord. The final chord is not the reward for tolerating all the annoying music beforehand.

The experience is happening while the music is playing.

That does not mean the answer is simply, “Stop wasting your life before it ends,” because that turns existence into another optimization exercise, as though the cosmic assignment is to maximize usage before expiration.

Maybe understanding does something stranger. Maybe it increases the resolution at which I experience reality.

A child and an astronomer can look at exactly the same night sky and technically be seeing the same stars, but the astronomer knows that some of the light entering her eyes has been traveling for millions of years. Nothing about the stars changed. The depth of her encounter with them did.

Maybe consciousness works similarly.

“Maybe understanding does not increase the utility of existence. Maybe it increases the resolution at which I experience reality.”

Understanding Jung does not erase my childhood. Understanding attachment does not make love painless. Understanding history does not change what happened. Understanding death certainly does not prevent it. But every layer of understanding can alter the resolution at which you encounter those things.

You see more, notice more, feel more, question more, and sometimes, inconveniently, suffer more too. Higher awareness is not necessarily a happiness technology. sometimes ignorance probably is easier.

But maybe awareness was never promising happiness, perhaps it was offering participation at a deeper level.

What Is Actually Mine?

This finally brings me back to agency.

I did not choose to be born. I did not choose my parents, my biology, my childhood, the century, most of the machinery inside my brain before I became conscious enough to notice it, or the inconvenient reality that eventually I am going to die.

Existence basically handed me a board game already in progress, refused to provide half the rules, gave several other players free will, and then informed me that at some unspecified point somebody is going to take the board away.

Not exactly the conditions a control-oriented person would have requested.

And yet I have real agency inside it.

I can decide what relationship I have with all of this. I can decide what I build, how I love, what I investigate, what I tolerate, what I refuse, where I place my attention, which inherited stories I continue participating in, which patterns I interrupt, what meaning I create and how consciously I inhabit whatever time I have… that is authorship.

What I cannot do is make reality promise to cooperate.

So maybe maturity is not surrendering control in some passive spiritual sense where I float downstream and tell everyone I am “trusting the universe.” That does not sound like me either.

Maybe maturity is becoming exceptionally responsible for what is actually mine while finally recognizing what never was.

That feels considerably closer to agency than resignation.

So What Am I Going to Do About It?

Which brings me all the way back to the woman who started this.

What am I going to do with all this knowledge?

I think my answer now is different than it would have been before the conversation started.

I am going to keep asking questions, keep pulling threads and keep investigating history, religion, consciousness, human behavior and all the strange ways human beings manufacture reality, because curiosity is simply part of how I move through the world and I have stopped requiring it to justify itself.

But I want to become much more interested in what the knowledge does to me.

Does it make me harder to manipulate and more aware of the stories I tell myself? Does it make me more willing to admit uncertainty where certainty is not warranted? Does it help me love people without requiring them to share my interpretation of reality? Does it help me recognize when I am searching for information because I genuinely need understanding and when I am using information to avoid the vulnerability of simply not knowing?

Because maybe knowledge was never supposed to save me from being human, maybe it gives me the opportunity to become more conscious inside the experience of being one.

And maybe that is enough… at least for today, but I reserve the right to become existentially irritated by the whole thing again tomorrow morning.

Something to Sit With

The question I am carrying now is this:

Where in your life are you genuinely seeking greater understanding, and where are you quietly hoping that if you understand enough you will finally be able to control the answer?

I know where it shows up for me, and I am starting to recognize it faster.

Perhaps that is the work, becoming more discerning about what is actually mine to author while allowing reality to retain the parts that were never mine to control in the first place.

I still do not know whether consciousness finally answers why we are here.

I am beginning to suspect it may do something more useful.

It may make us increasingly capable of recognizing what is ours to author while we are.

About Deevo

I’m Deevo, founder of The Brand Storyteller, and most of my work begins exactly the way this essay did. Someone brings me a question, a business problem, a decision, a relationship with their work, or something they cannot quite make sense of, and we start pulling on it until we understand what is actually going on underneath the thing that first brought them into the room.

That is The Thread Method.

Sometimes the thread leads somewhere strategic, sometimes somewhere human, and usually the separation between those two turns out to have been considerably tidier in theory than it is in actual life.

If you are carrying something you have become too close to see clearly, bring me the knot.

We’ll find the thread.

With Gratitude, Deevo www.thebrandstoryteller.com