Remembering the Dichotomy of Control
Last night I was feeling pretty good about myself: I had done an in-home strength workout, gotten lots of work done for my job, found a new (to me) video chat app called Houseparty, and cooked a healthy dinner for my significant other and me. Then, without even thinking about it, I picked up my phone and descended into Twitter.
The news tweets weren’t surprising, but that did little to diminish how upset I felt reading them. Our response to the pandemic, while largely heroic, is revealing itself with ever-increasing clarity to be too little, too late. People are dying–famous people, grandparents, children, young adults, doctors, nieces, nephews, spouses, friends–they are all dying and will continue to die. At best, when this is all over, the U.S. deaths will have to be measured with 6 digits. Most of the towns I have lived in did not have populations even close to that big.
Worse, I kept reading about/seeing how pathetic our leadership has been during all of this. The main messages I got from the “briefings” were (1) I am the greatest (just look at my TV ratings), (2) Everyone must be punished who lives in a place with a leader who disagrees with me, (3) My rich, captain-of-industry friends are also great; just look at how they repurposed their failing factories to make masks with a subsidy, and (4) The only reason there is any shortage of masks, other than the previous Administration not making enough 4 years ago, is that all the scumbag health care workers are stealing them to sell them on the black market (you know, the old “we’re only losing money because the help is robbing us under our very noses” plantation owners’ rant). (5) In conclusion, none of the bad things are my fault but rather my enemies’, and all of the good things are due to my friends and me.
But worst of all were the ratio-ing replies to these posts. It’s hard for me to tell how many replies are real people and how many are trollbots (there are ways, I’m sure, I just don’t know much about them and I don’t know how important it is as I’ll explain below). But the replies tend to fall into one of a few categories. First, there is the information-sharing-is-unpatriotic-and-unhelpful reply…things like “At least he’s doing something, what have you done, libtard?!” or “Surprise surprise, another blue check complaining about action instead of doing anything constructive,” all the way down to the basic troglodyte “Cry more, lib.” Second, there is the I-hate-you-because-you-hate-things-I-love reply…things like “So much hate coming from you, I’ll be praying for your soul,” and “Your hate and disrespect are the undoing of this country!” Third, there is the America-love-it-or-leave-it reply: “Go to China, then, if you hate our country so much,” and “No one is making you watch the briefing,” as well as “We don’t need you hippies! Except maybe for wall concrete!” Fourth, there is the We’re-the-lesser-of-two-evils reply, which usually consists of a fantasy scenario where the reply-maker’s enemy were put in charge, such as “Hillary would have sold us all to the Arabs and Chinese by now, and added Mexico as a state; is that what you’d prefer?!?” There are a few other categories but these seem to be the main ones.
Why these moronic replies distressed me so much (and why I even chose to read them in the first place) is beyond me. But it doesn’t really matter at all. Nor do the mechanics of how a tweet gets ratio-ed matter at all. The reason none of this matters is because None Of It Is Within My Control. Under a philosophy that has been proven for thousands of years to help us be happy, healthy and helpful, there is a dichotomy where there are two and only two kinds of things: Those within our control, and Those not within our control. What we should focus our time, energy, intellect and emotion on are the first type of thing. For the second type of thing, when we encounter Those not within our control our best response is to take deep breaths, embrace the moment, accept that those things exist, and then let go to focus on what we actually can control.
There are lots of things I can control (including what I choose to read), and unlike last night, I intend to spend today on those things.
Bike Newbie 