Locus of Control vs. Faith, Jumbled Up

Since leaving my job, I've been on a bit of a roller coaster.  I'm happy to be done with that place, worried about how to pay the bills while I go to school, and everything in between.

I've thought about posting here, except I'm not really sure what to say.  Some of that is because I don't want to sound whiny...which makes me wonder why we have to try so hard to sound positive and upbeat sometimes.

I've been driving for Lyft and Uber, though I've noticed that there just don't seem enough calls during the day to make it worth the effort.  One ride in an hour seems hardly worth the cost of driving out to pick someone up and back.  Most of the good hours are in the late evening, which kind of puts me on a second shift schedule.

So I've been looking for something else to help make this work.  Ideally a telecommuting job with flexible hours.  I thought I found something (a site that pays you to research and answer questions), but I found I was spending far too much time doing the research with no real guarantee that it will pay off.  If they don't like your sourcing, that is.  I could probably get better at it, but I'm not sure the ROI is worth it.  (Seems weird to use that business term here, but it really is a calculation of how much I'd get paid vs. the amount of time I'm putting into it.  I just don't see it.)

Meanwhile, this brings up an ongoing internal debate of mine.  If you've ever heard about locus of control, it's tied up with that.  Locus of control vs. religous faith, for an overly short version.

So here's the dilemma. For the most part, I believe in an internal locus of control.  That is, I can influence events and their outcomes.  My efforts can dictate the result, and if I can just make the right effort I can get wherever I want to be.

However.  I'm also aware that it's not as easy as that.  Life happens.  Plans get derailed.  You have to plan, but you have to be aware of changing conditions and change the plan if you need to.  In some ways, people who get too locked into their plans do themselves a disservice (like spending years learning to be a doctor or lawyer, and not pay attention to the fact that you hate what you do for a living.  Or pushing to become successful and wealthy, only to realize that you're on a never ending hamster wheel...always chasing that next sign of success without taking the time to discover who you really are and what makes you truly happy.)

I wonder how much of my thoughts are tied up with how I was raised re: money...over and over again books on success say that you have to have the right attitude towards money, and it's such a consistent message that I wonder if I sabotage myself because I don't have the right attitude.

Or, again...is it better not to chase it too much?  After all, some biographies of the wealthy make them seem sort of...disturbed.  Again, so focused on signs of success that they demonstrate the worst in humanity.  Shallow, superficial, obsessed with showing off their wealth while internally they show a poverty of spirit (not naming any names here.)  And yes, there's that religious upbringing again.

Okay.  So that's a brief overview of the locus of control issues.  I can control my fate, more or less, though some things will require a drastic change (so drastic I'm not even sure how to get there).  Or maybe I don't have as much control as I think.

On to the religious side.  Best captured, I think, by the bicycle story.  There are dangers in trying to control too much, there are experiences you miss, when you insist on a set path.  It's part of why everyone is suspicious of certain kinds of politicians.  The person at 20 who says "I'll never get a tattoo, because it might ruin my chances for office", or who says to themselves "This is someone I can date, because they'll look good beside me when I run for office."  They're setting up the path they think will take them where they want to go, and in the process how much do they miss out on?  How shallow is a relationship chosen simply because someone makes a good trophy wife?  Or husband, to be fair, though odds are more likely it's a trophy wife.  Plus, as I said earlier, "Life happens".  Too much of an attempt at control can lead to disastrous results.

So being open to new experiences, open to God...that seems important, too.  My Catholic grade school had a class once on "God's body language".  What I recall (20+ years later) was it basically was saying God 'speaks' to us through each other.  So for example, if you are hearing the same thing over and over again from different people in your life it could be God speaking through them to you.  (I don't feel I'm doing justice to that argument, and this was so long ago I don't even remember how it was taught to us, you probably ought to go talk to someone with a theological background if you actually want to understand it.  This is just what I remember).  Tied in with this is the whole "whenever one door closes, another opens".  Its...

It's about being open to the path God is leading you towards.  It assumes that there is a God, and that He (or She - I use 'He' more out of familiarity than any attempt to restrict God to a specific gender) is actively involved in your life, and leading you in a certain direction.  It also kind of assumes that God is leading  you somewhere that you want to be.  There are times when I quibble with these assumptions, like does He even exist?  If so, is He some distant deity concerned with weightier things than my worries and concerns?  Or is He active to the degree these statements imply?  Or would God make my life difficult, because He is so distant from our daily concerns that frustration, fear and insecurity are meaningless to Him?  Like, why should He bother to make sure we're financially secure?  The Bible had that whole parable about the flowers of the field, that get what they need without effort. (Leaving aside that droughts happen, and that flowers don't always get what they need...or a specific flower might not, even though the species of flowers may be doing just fine...but let's say the parable is true and the flower really does get what it needs)...would God really care about giving us financial stability?

Or are we supposed to trust that the bills will get paid, even if we don't really know how or when?  (and what kind of crappy life is it, when you're always dependent on some miracle coming in at the last minute?  Or are we supposed to learn to do without things like a house, and car, and mortgage?)  If we're supposed to trust in God, can we really trust him to care about material things like that?  Especially when so much of the Bible tells us not to get too hung up on worldly goods?

So...if I'm unhappy, or not where I want to be, is that because He is trying to lead me in a different direction, or am I just not hearing His will, or is it all a bunch of nonsense and I should dig in and use that locus of control to get where I want to be?

Like, where's the friggin sign?!?  Is it crazy to even expect a sign?!?  If there is one, can you make it bright neon, with arrows and everything...because apparently I'm not so good at reading the more subtle things.  (and, again, that nagging sense that it's ridiculous to sit around waiting for a sign in the first place.)

To add another layer to this, I want to relate an anecdote describing the types of signs I'm talking about.  A man had a house in an area threatened by a flood.  The water was about a foot high, when someone came by and offered to take him to safety.  The man said "No thanks, God will save me."

A little while later, the water continued to rise.  The man had to move up to the second story of his house.  Someone came by again, in a boat, and offered to take him to safety.  Again, he replied "No thanks, God will save me."

Finally, the water rose to the top of the house.  The man had to climb out onto his roof.  This time a helicopter came by, and again they offered to take the man to safety.  Again, he replied "No thanks, God will save me."

The man died, and when he got to heaven he said "God, why didn't you save me?!?"  to which God said "I sent you help three times!"

Is it faith, to sit around waiting for a miracle?  Mostly I think not.  That way lies danger...like the old Templars who died at the Battle of Hattin.  God seems to be on the side of those who use their brains, not those who expect Him to come through with a miracle.

And I know we have this tendency to fit our life experiences into a narrative.  When things are good, we look back and say "bad things had to happen that way, for me to get where I am now" and we make our peace with it.  That is to say, we can look back and say "God must have wanted x to happen, otherwise I wouldn't have done y"...but whether or not that's true has more to do with us making our lives into a story than anything objective.  Faith, at the heart of it, is rather subjective.

And yet, and yet...

and yet I can't help hoping there's some sort of meaning to it all.  It's exhausting to think it's all up to me.  I'm not up to the job.  There's all these people out there, competing...better positioned than I am.  Smarter than I am.  Better at networking then I am.  Better looking than I am.  Younger than I am.  Better at building support, or selling themselves, or whatever it is.

I'm not really quite sure what it is I'm doing wrong, but if I have control over my fate and I'm not happy with where I am, then I must be doing something wrong.  That is, if locus of control is all it's cracked up to be.

I used to think I knew what I was doing, now not so much.  And if all my plans and goals and efforts failed to get me where I wanted to be, maybe it's because I'm headed in the wrong direction.  Or that I'm not as good as I thought I was.  Or...I dunno, something.  That's exactly when you hear people of faith saying things like "Let go and let God", or something like that.

So I circle back to that openness to God, and almost feel like I'm throwing down the gauntlet.  Like "I know you're the Almighty, All Powerful, Creator of Heaven and Earth and I'm just some peon in no position to challenge You, but if You exist and want to be a part of my life then frigging Do Something!!!"

Which seems a horrible thing to demand.

Meanwhile, well...classes are still going well.  And it's not yet time to panic about the bills.  I do have some various ideas of things I can do, and will figure something out.  It's more a question of how painful this is going to be, and will I regret making the choice I did (after all, I did make the decision to leave my job and focus on school...so if it does get painful it's totally my fault.)

Corruption, Marketing,and Influence

Like most people, I have my own taste in music.  I like some of the current hits, dislike others, and mostly shrug and accept that taste is a personal thing and that not everyone will like the same things.

So when I was reading up on organized crime I found it interesting how they had a role in the jukebox industry, and in helping make some songs popular.  Now I had a second reason for why certain songs became popular, particularly from that era - someone with influence wanted to make it popular.

I brought this up because I wanted to discuss something with presidential elections, actually.  I wanted to go into more of what I meant by saying some people 'subvert the process'.  See - you don't generally get to those positions without a belief in your own locus of control.  That is, you are capable of influencing or controlling your fate.  There are all sorts of professionals out there willing to help (for a fee) make sure that you are marketed well.  Focus groups, political ads, consultants and speech writers...we all know politicians are practically a commodity in and of itself.  Kind of like music, or movies.  Except (just like with music and movies) it's very hard for an insider to know what is really going to work or not.

Movie history, in particular, is full of stories where directors thought something would be a hit and instead it failed miserably.  Or the reverse, where they make something nobody expected to be a hit.  Plus I think we've all had the experience of watching a movie when it first comes out, it's a big hit and we're super excited...and then when we watch it ten years later we wonder why the heck anyone thought it was that great to begin with.  I can watch a preview and know if the preview interests me or just makes me shrug, but how does the person creating the preview know?

Anyways, when you have people who are used to influencing opinion, creating opinion, waging a political battle for voters (and businesses) hearts and minds...how do you know when you're just playing the game of politics, and when you've crossed a line and subverted the system?

It's as easy for those of us on the outside to go "what were they thinking" when we see a horrible preview, as it is when we hear some story of corruption.  But the insider?  When they're in a business based on relationships?  How do they know when getting Vice President Biden's videotaped well wishes for a bar mitzvah is just a sign of friendship, versus the DNC chair putting her obligations to the Democratic Party in the backseat and drumming up support for her own re-election campaign?

Right now I'm not trying to say something was or wasn't corruption.  I just wanted to point out that something may not feel like corruption, may not seem to you as though it is affecting your judgment - and it still can be a problem.  My company's ethics training touched on this, with an example very similar to one I heard about in my undergrad years.  Someone offered tickets to a game...was that just two friends getting the chance to hang out together?  Or was it a bribe for helping the other guy out with a nice offer?

The thing is, lobbying, marketing, and sales reps all make money because what they do works.  And it doesn't necessarily work in an obvious fashion.  That is, a doctor doesn't say to him or her self "I'm going to prescribe this medicine to my patient because the sales rep gave me a really nice gift."  No...the doctor probably has a relationship with the sales rep, and thinks well of him or her.

Complaints about corruption come in part because average citizens can tell that what we want doesn't matter.  Like that study showing that economic elites and organized groups had an outsized influence on policy.  Trump is so radically different from the 'marketed' politician that many voters believe (foolishly, I think) that he's different.  That he's somehow more authentic, and not beholden to those interests.

Unfortunately, I think many political insiders convince themselves that there is no corruption, and that such charges are signs of naivety or foolishness.