“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” If you’d like empirical evidence to support Pascal’s quip, I present to you the 2020 lockdown. “Sitting quietly in a room alone” was the one thing we found we could not do well—at least not the “quiet” part. The global pandemic, confinement to our homes, the ticker on the news counting deaths, and the uncertainty of when it all would end made for a year most of us would just as soon forget. Individually and collectively, we made desperate attempts to get a handle on the situation. When we couldn’t, anxiety turned into frustration and irritation into outrage. When you’re used to having control and then it’s threatened, things get ugly. The promise of control is the engine driving our post-Enlightenment lives. From education and career, to romance and marriage, to giving birth and parenting, to aging and dying, our late-modern ways of life reflect the desire to stay in as much control as possible. And understandably so. Control has many advantages. The problem, however, as the philosopher Hartmut Rosa explains, isn’t control itself but when our quest for control “begins to permeate every aspect of life.” When we imagine we can plan, predict, manage, and execute our way to a happy life, several painful complications recur. READ MORE ABOUT OUR PROBLEM WITH CONTROL | 
