Heroin is for junkies. May I be addicted to control, please?

“Those who restrain themselves will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” This is how the modern Bible should begin. However, what can one be in control of in the world of the pandemic, global political shit-shows and environmental challenges? Or, let’s go closer to everyday life, in the world of self-isolation, life-long rent, inevitable economical crisis, Netflix binge-watching, and syndrome of phantom smartphone’s vibration. Yet, I do not only think that I am succeeding in gaining control but seem to be getting addicted to it.

Take 1. Apps

I take my smartphone and check the sobriety tracker, just to pat myself for how long I didn’t drink. After a long walk, I check how many steps I’ve done. I get really upset if Nike App lags and I lose tracking data of my morning run. Before I quit, I registered every smoked cigarette in a tracker. Now, I know for sure for how many months, days and hours I didn’t smoke. My consciousness is under a good eye of a special app too. It reminds me if I haven’t meditated for a couple of days. Of course, I do check my spendings statistics at my banking apps. The apps kindly procure me a detailed report, showing how much I spent on entertainment, groceries, and shopping. Finally, on Mondays, I usually get a weekly report of my iPhone usage so I know exactly how much time I talked on WhatsApp, scrolled Facebook newsfeed, stared at Insta ads or procrastinated on YouTube. Of course, I do have a weekly planner, regularly use Google calendar, and strongly believe that correct planning is an essential part of everyday life. Yes, it gives me a sense of being in control of my life.

Take 2. A friend

“I don’t know whether they leave me on this job if the quarantine is prolonged for another month,” told my friend the other day. A week later we were discussing how she was going to cut the consumption of junk food. She provided an analysis of the reasons due to which she used to eat burgers and chips. She explained her system for the gradual drop of such eating habits. She developed at least two effective strategies of how to implement it. Moreover, we also brainstormed a set of tactical tools for possible episodes of sudden weakness or breakdowns. Yes, she is a good manager and her approach is serious. If quitting junk food was a professional project she definitely would get an award for it. Is the problem of junk food objectively substantive in her life right now? Don’t think so. But are we really interested here in objectivity?

Take 3. Inside

The less I feel like the one who’s able to control something out of their personal borders, the more I am to compensate it with strengthening the control of myself. Everything, I would call “me” — my mind, emotions, body, and feelings — provide a full range of options of what can be taken under control. At this point, it becomes especially tempting to substitute the verb “to control” with “to know”. I need to explore those spheres and, via this act, to take them under control in order to overcome bad habits or change negative thinking patterns, for instance. From this perspective, it sounds good. Of course, as long as all these improvements make me as an individual feel content and don’t affect my “expansion” into the outer world.

It is hard to control relationships with other people but always possible to diet endlessly and, through this, have an illusion of action and change. It is complicated to change a profession you hate and coworkers who make you sick but always possible to meditate an hour a day to peace your mind. So, the question erects when the focus stays locked in the inner zone, turning self-control and self-development into a kind of neverending grooming ritual, the updated version of fleas picking in primates.

Let’s go back to a friend of mine: Is there a way for her to skip the anxiety about the contract’s destiny? Yes, there is one: By switching her attention to something she has more control upon — to the food she eats, for instance.

Take 4. Covid

I am not happy with just being fine. Most of us are not. Look at what people do and post during the months of the global COVID-19 crisis: do online-yoga, take online-classes, write a book, train yourself for a marathon, run a new project, and so forth. While we are literally locked in our houses, we need results, achievements, and new shiny medals more than ever. It actually doesn’t matter whether you get one in some embroidery competition, at your bookclub's zoom-gathering, or at the Olympics. The level of happiness will be more or less the same.

But what if one is too afraid, unconfident, or too worried to work on external projects and voluntarily gets stuck in their personal improvement zone? In this case, one put goals that are totally absurdist if you think about it: to read a book a week, no matter how much time one needs to digest and realize the read; to have no wrinkles by following that OCD-like time-consuming skincare routine; to make that quaggy belly flat again having workouts for two hours daily having a job, household and kid on the shoulders… Add to this list no smoking, no drinking, no sugar, no caffeine, no carbs, no bad mood, no hate thoughts, no negative patterns, no tears, no procrastination, no objections, no unexplainable apathy—you name it.

Take 5. Product

Constantly working on oneself as like one is a product or an artwork, it is easy to treat self-development as a project. The one which is understandable and accessible for most people even in the circumstances we are now. It seems so normal because such behaviour was always highly appreciated in the competitive and success-oriented world: we praised those who inspired us to change our lives, whatever they did. Plus, it never was so easy to get the everyday portion of what people call now “inspiration” as it is today. Inspired by Instagram motivational icons, one thinks that wrinkles, hang-overs, and bad moods do not exist if one does everything correct, right? But they exist. Therefore, I think I am not doing enough, I am trying not hard enough, I have to try to control myself better.

In this cycle of “being the best one can”, one is doomed to find over and over again a new point of improvement: To track something that was not tracked before; to analyse scrupulously the routine to find the new bits of chaff in the bucket of wheat; to seek brand-new wisdom of brand-new superfoods, fashionable exercises or ultra-conscious guided meditations. The most important trick here is to make this aim your own, to believe you managed not to be influenced by the regular media attacks: Both official media, setting anxiety about the world, and social — making you doubt normality of yourself.

Take 6. Cycle

People are so anxious about losing control that some of us produce constant confirmations that they are fine, while others watch them and believe that these people succeed in controlling their lives. Food-bloggers, fitness-evangelists, yoga-gurus, adepts of mindfulness, stylish Insta-moms and business/personal/spiritual coaches of various kinds, deliver content regularly, not giving time to have a pause and think. We help each other to build and stay into the illusion of control and its possibility. One more size down, and you’ll be finally happy. One more award, and you’ll be finally okay. One more self-praising post, and you’ll believe you worth something. The run lasts for too long to even notice it. This is the right place to offer some fashionable social media detox challenge, promising better sleep, pinkier cheeks and joyful mood as the award. But I will not.

Take 7. Sacrifice

Self-control needs efforts, limitations, and hardships. It has to be a fight, only in this case it worth anything. One has to resist the temptations, constantly provided by the outside world, and try as hard as one can. Does it remind you anything?

“Forgive me, Father, as I am sinful: the world seduced me again with a Milka chocolate bar and a pack of Marlboro.” The demands, we are putting on, sometimes are absurdly high and are not about the thing itself but about the sensation of overcoming. For example, one has to stop using social media only if one has been using them very actively before, in the other case, if one hasn’t—please, choose another way of mortifying flesh. You can pick not to drink in a culture where an absolute majority of social processes are linked to alcohol consumption. Or not to eat sugar and processed food in cities which are packed with chain-stores and eateries stuffed with such products. It has to be about suffering and sacrifice or it is simply not the thing.

Take 8. Protest

In some sense, the act of self-control masks the desperate act of protest. This not-okayish world and not-okayish me in this world can, metaphorically saying, go to hell, as long as I am different from it, as long as I am fighting against it and me in it. It is not that senseless as it seems: it means that at least I am noticing that the state of things is not okay but the real problem is too big and deep to even think about it. The protest subverts itself — dieting is easier than revolution.

Take 9. Love

The tension of “being not okay” is so big, that some of us totally redefine the meaning of “being okay” just not to feel the helplessness of losing control. To love yourself has become an achievement, have you noticed it?

Various teachers and gurus promise to teach me how to love myself as if it is the same as how to count taxes properly. To love yourself became an indicator of being in control, along with dieting and exercising. The odd thing about it is that the feeling of “loving yourself” has to be controlled, too. It is not possible in this concept to feel any bad toward myself. “I am fine as long as I love myself, “ I have to be thinking. Whatever I am, whatever I do, whatever is right or wrong with me — love myself. If I can’t — I have to go and try harder, take another lecture on Coursera, and do it, for God’s sake, finally.

Take 10. Wisdom

The phrase “You just don’t love yourself enough” became an irritating, yet senseless, lexeme — nobody is able to explain what it really means and where the “enough” starts and ends. Gurus have a vague reply “You will feel it”. No, I won’t. If we are selling and buying something as actively as we are doing it with self-love, let’s at least define it somehow.

Both the first Western life-coaches from the middle of the XX century and the Instagram icons of today have a typical and very popular answer: “You succeeded on the way of loving yourself if your life is under control.” Even though some of them also say “Just let it go and tune the right mood”, it still promises to control the result one gets in this semi-mystical way of letting it go and tuning the right mood.

The idea of the link between love and control quite a contradictional one. Self-control involves lots of restrictions as it is often connected with habits, food, behaviour, thoughts, and emotions. Imagine somebody behaving like this with you, restricting you in everything you do. Would you call it love? Or would it be more precisely to put it as abuse?

“If I do this. If I don’t do that. If I have “if” in my mind thinking on this issue, I don’t really love myself, because true love has to be unconditional,” they said. Somebody has put it into my mind and I ate it with no questions. Seems that self-control and loving yourself are quite far from each other, but I don’t sense it. I do feel better about myself doing correct, from my point of view, things. Perhaps like many others. But is it related to love? Do “thinking good of myself” has much in common with “loving myself”?

Watching how this idea multiplies in social media and self-help books, it seems, that not giving it any good critical re-evaluation, we blindly take loving ourselves as a Saint Graal of today. Somehow we believe that loving ourselves stops the cycle of suffering and frustration. As if I finally do it right, whatever the “right” means, it will guarantee me a life full of happiness and tranquillity. The absurdity of this cycle is obvious: I have to control myself and meet some conditions to get inner permission to love myself “unconditionally”. But “unconditionally” means not to control yourself and accept yourself as you are, with no improvement.

Take 11. Happy

There is no room for the feelings of being weak, powerless and vulnerable. If you feel it go and treat it. You have to enjoy this life. Look, isn’t it beautiful? Why can’t you be calm, happy and productive? Why are you always thinking of all these uncertain stuff?

There are no answers to these questions in the media except this one: control yourself as effectively as you can and, maybe, you will eventually become just like your favourite bloggers — happy. Track your every breath, be busy with calculating calories and planning your healthy menu, escape the boredom at any price (don’t forget to track steps you did and post about it), find another new prophet on Instagram, and love yourself unconditionally but only after all the conditions have been met. Don’t get drunk, don’t gain weight, don’t worry, don’t hate ZOOM-meetings, and don’t panic reading news. Control your life and be healthy, conscious, effective, beautiful, happy, happy, happy all the time.

This is an endless chase of happiness. This year, when so many of us were 24/7 at our homes, it looked remarkably absurdist. It is time to accept the fact that it is impossible to be okay all the time and to switch focus from the constant self-improvement to something that lays outside of the very narrow personal borders.

Total self-control doesn’t guarantee anything. The second metaphor: it isn’t very much different from the rituals of rain’s summoning. “If I kill the best goat in my flock the rain will start and my harvest will be saved.” I am doing the same with myself. With the only difference that the flock is my body and mind, and the goat is something I like a lot but think is wrong. Hear me right, there is nothing bad in living the way that helps keep health or mood fine but it is important not to overestimate it as it won’t bring the everlasting blessing of being happy, young and immortal.

Take 12. Heaven

The core thing is that self-control is just one of the ways to feel the hit of better feeling about myself. The same pedal for getting a pleasant neurotransmitters’ rush as sugar, nicotine, achievements, or some drugs. The utopian way to achieve utopian eternal happiness — heaven — at least for a moment or two. To touch that unachievable peak, even though one can’t stay there.

The idea of heaven is simple yet appealing: “May I don’t decide anything and be constantly happy with no frustration, sadness or suffering of any kind, please?” But the endless pleasure kills eventually. Recall the experiment with mice and electrodes in their brains. It is obvious when we think about people addicted to the substances which give them the feeling of being alright in the totally non-alright world. Why not extrapolate? The last thing, which I would call “maturity” in my life started with the realization of the impossibility of the concept of heaven.

None of us is a product or an art-work. In fact, we still know so little about our bodies and psyche that staying in the illusion of having total control is, as minimum, odd. Self-development is an absorbing way to spend life, this is true, but it will not open the gates of heaven because of the simple thing — here is no heaven.