Advice From My Reading Addiction

And our perception of control

“You are afraid of surrender because you don’t want to lose control. But you never had control; all you had was anxiety.” — Elizabeth Gilbert

Did you know Spotify has audiobooks now?

I don’t know how I feel about that since Spotify is notorious for not paying music artists…but I started listening to Brené Brown. I feel like she makes enough money already so it’s fine, right?

Anyway, I was listening to Atlas of the Heart earlier last month and that quote from Elizabeth Gilbert has been sitting with me.

Maybe not in the way you think though.

One of the quickest ways to exercise “control” over others is anxiety. Fear-based marketing is real and it is soso effective. And I think that’s why.

I have no knowledge of why we believe anxiety = control, but I do know that a lot of businesses use this tactic to sell a lot more — telling their audience that they are low in stock or only have so many days to buy in, with some businesses on Instagram even claiming ‘out of business’ sales, when it is the furthest from the truth.

I guess we’re pulling on a very old thread of human existence to achieve this idea of control or success, but it always leaves me questioning if it HAS to be this way.

I mean anxiety was used to keep us alive and to keep us in good standing with our tribe. We needed to be accepted by other humans to survive.

Today, with the individualization of most aspects of our lives, that anxiety has to go somewhere, and leads many of us to micromanage our experience with this idea that “this will surely fix me,” with every decision we make. Sadly, it doesn’t, and life goes on until another wave of that anxiety crashes into us, leaving us looking for yet another thing to assert our false control over.

And businesses ride that wave to make a lot of money. It’s been working back when marketing first entered society to push men to join wars with this idea that “if I go to war, I will have a wife waiting for me at home and I will take control of my life and have control over what happens to this country,” and it works today as we all race to grab that celebrity branded item that we put us in good standing with our peers, or that 15 step skincare routine that will surely turn us into models.

I even wrote in my notes app at 2 in the morning,

“Urgency as a human experiment: retail marketing creates this sense of urgency to buy before all is gone, as if we are missing out on something, and voting does that now too. It makes us believe we have any say in anything, through fear, urgency, anger. If we don’t vote and if we don’t actively participate in a system that is clearly failing, our say won’t matter, as if it ever mattered to begin with. It shields the truth behind where the power really lies.”

Perceived control is a powerful tool.

But, I hope one day, it is not our only tool.