finding powerlessness

five ways to feel like you don't have any control over your life.

… grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

i’ve found very few sayings that accomplish so much in as few words as the serenity prayer of alcoholics anonymous.

unfortunately, a prayer cannot provide us this wisdom and courage that we so wish to grant ourselves. it is through experience and deliberate learning that we can discover and nurture these qualities within ourselves.

but this is the start. this is the intention toward a framework of personal development that so few people in the world are willing to commit to.

to admit that we don’t control over everything, to know that we have the ability to recognize what we can change and act on the recognition, and to know what it truly takes to make it happen—courage and wisdom—is the intention everyone has during their first step toward a deep and heartfelt change in their life, but they haven’t yet formulated these words yet.

it’s not a surprise that it took the darkness of alcoholism to make such a mantra. some of the best things in life are made from great and terrible struggle.

it’s just up to the rest of us to be listening and sharing these gems with those who haven’t hit that kind of rock bottom.

let’s consider a lifestyle living opposite of the intention set by the serenity prayer: someone who stubbornly attempts to force the impossible, constantly disappointed by obstacles in their way, but avoid those real opportunities for change because they are afraid of what they might experience if they followed through: identity-level transformation.

for some people, no matter how much they want their circumstances to change (more money, better relationships, peaceful life), they do not want to admit that they can change to meet those desired circumstances, because it would admit responsibility over their lives.

it can be easier to resentfully leave responsibility to a significant other, a job, their family, or their health.

it leaves the victim floating and bobbing over the waves of life, relaxed in their suffering. they are at peace with their supposed powerlessness.

now i’ll briefly provide five ways to maintain your powerlessness in life.

the theme shared by all five methods is the attachment to everything outside of your being, anything that will come and go with no action on your part.

as long as you stay driven to desperately achieve and keep these things, you’ll always maintain the powerlessness you were looking for.

driven by success

try to stick to other people’s definition of success, and if you should ever achieve their idea of success, then search around until you find out that someone has an even higher standard of success, and chase that.

as you continue being driven by constantly by society’s constantly changing definitions of success, you’ll maintain a level of confusion and dissatisfaction that will also lead you to a lot of dead-ends that you’ll feel stuck or trapped in.

it’s very effective.

driven by approval and love

you’ll never find a better way of feeling powerless than by seeking the approval and love of others, because your desperation for it will cause others to either distance themselves from you or manipulate you to do things for them to feel a semblance of approval or love.

you can make this drive even more disempowering by only allowing self-approval and love for yourself once you get it from others. this way, your personal worth will stay defined by the whims and moods of others in your life.

driven by strong emotions

if you make important decisions and actions while you’re furious and depressed, you’ll be able to skate through life wondering why you’ve pushed so many people and opportunities away.

as long as you tell yourself that these strong emotions are who you are, you can continue blaming others that avoid you for just not getting you. so then you can attract others who are also driven by their own strong emotions.

you’ll never be short of a story in which fights or manipulation occurred, even as you tell others, “i don’t want drama”…

driven by money and things

just think, you focused your entire youth on making money and getting things, and you’re 50 and you have all the money and all the things and nothing else.

so then you’ll try to use the money to get people and experiences you never got when you were young, so you attract other people who are driven by money and things and are willing to give up their youth to you so they can have the money and things that you provide.

it’s a virtuous cycle of wanting and getting and making up for lost time.

driven by control and power

who knew that being so attached to control and power would make someone feel so powerless? but through the constant meditation on control and power, we’ll always see the cracks—what we can’t control, and what we don’t have power over.

and we’ll feel so angry and sad that we don’t have power over that person or thing. we’ll feel so powerless, even as we control and manipulate others through life. this is because when we are driven we focus on what we don’t have, rather than appreciating what we do have.

when we are driven by circumstances out of our control, who is in the driver’s seat of our life?

why do we drive? because we believe the thing we want isn’t here. so we go out and get it, going there to get that—the thing we don’t have.

we have our current location—where we’re at now—and our destination—where we want to be.

but who is the one telling us what our destination should be?

we spend a lot more gas and time getting driven to places if we allow ourselves to be conditioned by other people, other things, other ideas. all of this outside stuff is a collection of detours, of people with brightly colored signs yelling, “go my way!”

when we can determine the difference between being driven by our values and our conditioning, we’ll be able to skip the detours and develop our own routes for fulfillment.

and sometimes it’ll use someone else’s route! but it’s finally our choice to go down that road.

but i digress, because the goal of this article was to maintain your powerlessness.

oops!

thanks for reading,

—dom