Illusion of control

Cause that was really good stuff in the book next week.

Never split the difference by Chris Voss chapter seven, create the illusion of control.

I don't read ahead.

So I'm looking forward to that one, but now we're going to talk about Jimmy's topic, which is the other AI authentic interaction.

I have to see what that's about.

Our book club has never split the difference.

Chapter 7, Create the Illusion of Control.

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But as far as being able, and yeah, sure, you can probably see something coming over the horizon occasionally and be able to head it off if you're lucky.

I mean, some people suffer from this, myself included, the illusion of control.

The illusion of control.

Everyone suffers from that.

And you have an election that doesn't go your way, if that was the case last night.

He believed the threat was immediate.

His solution reflects something psychologists would call the illusion of control, the tendency to overestimate one's ability to influence outcomes.

Criminal investigations rarely depend on a single piece of evidence, though.

Evidence destruction can also be understood through motivated reasoning.

Why? Because humans have a powerful tendency to believe we can influence outcomes that are already determined by chance.

Psychologists call this the illusion of control.

The term was first introduced by psychologist Ellen Langer in the 1970s.

She conducted a series of experiments investigating how people behave in situations involving luck and chance.

Ownership wasn't the only thing affecting them.

Control was, or at least the feeling of control.

The illusion of control appears everywhere.

Think about gambling.

You have to take your foot off the gas, hold the wheel loosely, and just, you know, surrender to the momentum until the tires naturally find traction again.

You literally have to give up the illusion of control to survive.

And it feels completely terrifying in the moment, but that counterintuitive logic is the only thing that keeps you alive on the ice.

Which is such a perfect metaphor for what we are talking about today because what is so compelling about our subject is how that exact same physics lesson applies to our psychological survival.

The ego is just an evolutionary defense mechanism.

It tries to keep us safe by predicting and controlling the future.

And Fenster calls this the illusion of control.

Yes.

You know, I'm worried about this or that.

And that worrying gives us this illusion of control.

But the key there is that it's an illusion because we can't be controlling something that isn't happening right now.

We can certainly plan for things, but by definition, something that's in the future, we don't have control over because it's not happening right now.

It really is.

The illusion of control.

Let's talk about why the brain prefers guilt over helplessness.

It is the absolute bedrock of why victims blame themselves.

If it's your fault, your brain can pretend that you have the power to stop it.

Wow.

Taking the blame creates this incredibly powerful, seductive illusion of control.

You start thinking, "If I had just stayed quiet when they walked in, the fight wouldn't have happened."

So to alleviate the anxiety of this new terrain called happiness, the brain demands you take the new shoes off, throw them in the trash, and put the painful, familiar ones back on.

Which perfectly explains the illusion of control.

Because when Chris brings her the soup, the brain detects a massive deviation from the pattern.

It flags kindness as a lethal threat in disguise.

So what does this all mean for us? Let's wrap this up and synthesize what we've covered today.

We have journeyed deep into the primal evolutionary mechanisms of the human brain, seeing how it ruthlessly prioritizes immediate survival and threat avoidance over a happy, fulfilled life.

We've looked at the tragic, heartbreaking illusion of control to the logic of pushing the rock off the cliff ourselves, just so we don't have to endure the psychological torture of waiting for the wind to blow it over.

we've exposed the terrible slumlord living in our heads the one fiercely guarding the toxic childhood core belief that we are somehow fundamentally broken simply because that chaos feels proficient and metabolically familiar and we've seen that the way out isn't a magical cinematic cure it is a slow quiet agonizingly mundane daily practice of pausing building the distress tolerance muscle of peace speaking our deepest fears out loud and letting the good things stay on a random Tuesday.