Things are going to happen in our lives. Some of which we can control, some of which we can’t.

Here are some examples of things that we can control:

Our own actions: whether we make our bed in the morning, or come home to crumpled bedsheets. Whether we proof read an email one more time, or gauge it’s probably good to go after two skims. Whether we go for a walk in the sun to clear our minds, or let the YouTube algorithm suck us further into another hour of clickbait scrolling.
How we choose to respond to situations: Do we hesitate about raising our voice in a meeting, for fear of being thought stupid? Do we let a flash of anger lead to a verbal or physical lashing out? Do we show happiness in a moment by hugging the person next to us to share it with them?

It’s a pretty short list.

Now here are some examples of things we can’t control.

The weather.
Other people’s driving decisions on the road.
How other people respond to you in the store.
How people interact on social media.
Basically, every single thing other people think, feel, say and do
Black holes swallowing up this particular universe.
The temperature inside a street food vendor’s pie: always searingly hot

This list is basically everything else in life.

Thinking about what we can and can’t control is philosophical.

Philosophy in its simplest form is stringing together thoughts into a belief system that makes sense to us.

In order to navigate the world around us that is typically full of uncertainty, having a form of reliable belief system can really help us out. But in order to believe something, we need to think about what we can rely on and what we can’t. What feels true, and what doesn’t. What we can control, and what we can’t. Because when we come across something that we can’t control, we usually have an emotional reaction. And emotions reveal to us that our belief system of the world has been challenged.

Feeding my niece is a constant battle of belief systems. When the chair comes out, and the bib goes on, she gets excited. She knows smashed pea goodness is coming her way soon. She loves peas. She never wants that mushy green goodness to end. It is her belief that it never should end. But her system gets challenged when the bowl starts emptying. And when the unthinkable and uncontrollable happens - the bowl gets taken away - she has a very emotional reaction.

*Another belief system being shattered (not actually my niece)*

Now, she gets a pass because she’s only a year old (and because she’s my niece). She doesn’t know how to use her emotions to help her navigate this uncertain world of emptying food bowls and her belief system that they should be never ending. But you only need to take a quick scroll down a Facebook or Twitter thread to realise that far too many adults struggle to implement this lesson, too.

Our emotions are useful tools for learning how to deal with the uncertainty of not being able to control everything that happens in our lives.

Sometimes shitty things will happen that will make us sad, or anxious, or jealous or some other emotion. Sometimes great things will happen that lead us to feel happy, or joyful, or content. The point is not to suppress or run from our emotions. But to ask ourselves why we feel that emotion, and to learn from it.

You see, way back when, an old Greek guy called Plato thought emotions could be tamed. He imagined a scenario in his mind of a chariot and two horses:

The chariot represents Reason. And the horses represent our Emotions, both good and bad. He saw the whip of Reason as being all that was necessary to keep emotions in line. He thought our duty was to control and keep them in check to get to where we want to be. And this image makes you believe this may be possible.

People who think about their emotions in this way probably say “I’m fine” a lot. They’re desperate to control any indication of an emotional response to a criticism, piece of bad news, or anything that causes them to feel something discomforting. They’re trying to control their emotions - but that doesn’t stop their bodies and minds from feeling them. The horses are still raging, even if they’re seemingly raging forward.

But emotions don’t work like that. We can’t control when we feel happiness, or sadness, or jealousy, as hard as we might try. The ability of emotions to make themselves noticed is always present. The balance of their power can often feel a lot more like this:

*The Elephant and the Rider -* *Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis*

We think our rational brain is in control, but the reality is that if a triggering mouse appears unexpectedly out of a nearby bush, and our emotional brain wants to put massive foot after massive foot and tear through the nearest local village, there’s not a lot we can actually do. We have a lot less power than we think we do over our emotions.

But we can help to understand what spooks the elephant in the first place. To get comfortable with the fact that mice are not always a threat. We need to work with our emotions to figure out what can keep us plodding along a steady path towards where we want to go, and negotiating the unexpected along the way.

When we do this, and use our emotions to understand our environment, we can make progress along our path.

We should think carefully about how we respond to the things we can control, and just leave the rest alone.

After Plato, some Roman guys got in the act and became known as the Stoics. They essentially went full Bob Marley and said if you can’t control something, why bother about it? No point getting worked up over something you can’t control, anyway. They believed we should detach ourselves from being affected - ‘having our emotions stirred’ - by anything that’s outside of our control. And then spent a lot of time thinking about what is, and isn’t, in our control.

And when they settled on something that they thought they could control, Stoics then believed in applying a whole bunch of reason to the situation, and tried to use it to choose reactions to situations. They referred to this approach as ‘minimising the ego’. But, in doing so, kinda completely disregarded the elephant-sized nature of our emotions:

But their root idea of choosing carefully what we should and shouldn’t respond to, and to choose our response, is a key one. It paved the way for the idea that if we give a shit about everything, or too many things, our lives are basically going to be one constant chain of unnecessary and taxing emotional reactions to things. It’d be like unleashing the Pied Piper down our elephant’s path.

Ricky Gervais sums up the ridiculousness of caring far too much about things we can’t control in a genius piece of perspective that is easily worth 56seconds of your time. Let’s take a quick look at how you feel about guitar lessons:

The idea of choosing what to care about was taken up once again almost two thousand years later by the Existentialists, who turned up the volume on it all the way to ‘full responsibility’.

You are responsible for everything in your life. You might not be responsible for what happens to you, but you are always responsible for how you choose to respond.

The Existentialists were around in the early 1900s. So they had the benefit of reflecting on human history from a number of perspectives. They looked back on hundreds of years of reason, scientific discovery, growth in the understanding of medical and technological advances, and came to the following, somewhat humbling conclusion:

“Shit. Despite all this cool stuff mankind has achieved, it’s actually impossible to know everything.”

They recognised that reason had limits, and what we think we are certain of today, will likely be challenged in the future.

They believed that we can (and should) listen to and learn from science in its current form. But they had seen examples of many things that were believed to be true for much of humankind being shown to be false in the trueness of time. Societies used to believe the world was flat, and that migraines were caused by demons in the brain that needed to be let out with a large chisel, after all.

Existentialists recognised that shifting our opinions as the evidence evolved seemed to be a pretty good approach to things. It certainly resulted in less chisel-shaped holes in our heads.

But, more importantly, recognising the limits of reason highlighted to them that even the smartest brains that have ever existed had the one crucial thing in common with everybody else: we’re all just operating under our best guess at how things work at any given time.

So while reason and logic are undeniably useful, they have their limitations. Particularly because we’re all different people with our own belief systems that might fly in the face of other forms of logic. Our inherent individual biases, prejudices and perceptions mean we cannot focus solely on reason to understand the world as the Stoics might have wanted because we’ll constantly be clashing against other belief systems.

And the existentialists in the 1920s and 1930s had just lived through a couple of pretty shitty, war-torn decades. They knew all about clashing belief systems, and the horrifying consequences they can result in. And, in turn, this led to their obsession with responsibility. They weren’t going to just let us off the hook at this point. Not being able to use reason isn’t an excuse to not choose how we respond to situations.

They believed that we all have a duty to focus on this responsibility to choose our responses and what they called ‘authenticity’. Here’s their cheat-sheet equation for life:

Life is inherently flawed: The world around us is full of uncertainties; it’s ambiguous
Knowledge is inherently limited: We can’t all know everything to form a single view of reality
Emotions are inevitable: We’re all just trying our best to make sense in this uncertain world

Therefore:

Our best defence against this uncertain state of affairs is to develop self-awareness, to tame our elephant, in order to take responsibility for all of the choices that we make, not just in life, but towards our emotions.

We are responsible for the path our elephant walks even if we aren’t always in control of it and it’s paved with uneven and ambiguously shaped boulders and stones to navigate.

Here’s what walking an existentialist path might look like:

None of us really know what we’re doing. As a result, we are always in some form of anxiety as we’re constantly faced with the challenge of making choices in uncertain and unknowable conditions.
But because we are forced to make these choices, it makes us inherently responsible for everything we do. It is our duty not to deny or hide from this responsibility.
It is, of course, much easier to avoid choices, to adopt an attitude of “it’s not my fault”, but to do so would be “to live in bad faith”. This is a tactic designed to avoid pain in the short-term, but will only result in us suffering drawn out anguish over the longer term.
Once we choose to accept this level of responsibility, it frees us up to be who we really are - to allow us to live in authenticity. And it is only in this state that we can live out the lives we have truly chosen for ourselves; lives of meaning.

Living in authenticity is acting in a way that is an accurate reflection of our feelings, beliefs and ideas - actions which represent our values.

Our values are ultimately who we are. They are what will come to define us in the eyes of those around us. Our identity, and the extent to which we feel that life is meaningful, is defined by our values. And their most truthful expression is always through our actions and choices, not the stories we might tell ourselves in our minds.

And this is The Grey Life. It is facing up to the uncertainty of what life might hold with the conviction to live out your values through actions that you hold yourself responsible for, and accountable to.

This is the final post in the ‘Learning from…’ series, foundational ideas behind living with modern life’s challenges. These building blocks are designed to set a platform for choosing your own values, purpose and goals in life.

To learn more about how to do just that, visit The Grey Life Course here.

10. On Responsibility