The Illusion of Control in Human Connections
We weave through the complexities of human connections, it is perhaps a little too easy to forget that the only person we truly know is ourselves. Everyone else—friends, family members, colleagues, and lovers—are, in a sense, unfamiliar and unpredictable entities that we attempt to bring into our lives.
We think of them as extensions of our desires, functions in the greater machinery of our day-to-day existence. However, perhaps relationships are less like the human connections we idealize and more like machines we expect to perform specific tasks for us.
Imagine, for a moment, that every person you let into your world is a gadget. When you purchase a new device, you have a specific purpose in mind: perhaps it’s a coffee maker to warm your mornings, a phone to streamline your communication, or a vacuum cleaner to keep things tidy. You spend your money, you take it home, and you expect it to work the way you envisioned.
But then, disappointment sets in. The coffee maker doesn’t brew quite the way you hoped; the phone’s battery drains too quickly; the vacuum cleaner can’t reach that stubborn corner. What do you do? Most of the time, you take it back, demanding a refund. Yet, with human beings, the transaction is different. The energy you invest isn’t monetary; it’s emotional, woven from your time, hopes, and vulnerabilities. When a human “machine” fails to meet your expectations, there’s no customer service desk and no easy return policy.
The Emotional Cost of Expectations
We get into relationships—whether romantic, familial, or platonic—with the same hope that we attach to a shiny new gadget. We want it to serve a purpose, to fulfill a need, to fix some broken part of ourselves. And just like we don’t choose our starting equipment (our family members), we often try to make do, repurposing, forcing, cajoling these machines into roles they were never built for.
The difference here, the one that traps us, is that we can’t easily let these human “gadgets” go. The reason? The price we pay is our very essence: the energy that moves us, our emotions and feelings, the parts of ourselves that we’ve infused into them.
This is where things get complicated. While a faulty vacuum is easy to discard, a person who disappoints us leaves a gap that is far harder to reconcile. You see, the way we value loss and gain is skewed like a strange equation that never balances out.
If you gain something, say a dollar, it gives you one unit of happiness. But if you lose something you already had, even if it’s just that same dollar, the sadness is doubled. The anguish of losing what we thought was ours burns twice as deeply as the joy of gaining it in the first place.
This is what the Zeigarnik effect teaches us: unfinished tasks and unresolved feelings cling to us like shadows, haunting the corners of our minds. For deeper insight into this psychological phenomenon, see this research paper on the Zeigarnik Effect.
So when we let someone go, it’s not just the person we’re releasing; it’s all the hope, all the dreams, and all the imagined futures that person represented.
Letting Go of the Illusion
Here’s the catch: we cannot change people to fit into the molds we design for them unless they wish to change themselves. Machines can be tinkered with, reprogrammed, and upgraded. Human beings cannot. If they act in ways that surprise or hurt us, it is not because they are malfunctioning. They are simply running their own software, following their own programming. Our expectations, no matter how reasonable they seem, are not part of their operating manual.
So what do we do when the person we thought would light up our world turns out to be a dim bulb, when the friend who was supposed to vacuum up our sorrows merely scatters them further? We have a choice: we can try to return the gadget and walk away if that’s possible, or we can let go of our expectations and appreciate what they can offer.
Perhaps
Perhaps, like an outdated lamp, they don’t light up the entire room but cast a soft glow that’s gentle and comforting.
Perhaps, like a clunky radio, they don’t have Bluetooth or modern features. But they still play a tune that reminds you of simpler times.
Or maybe, just maybe, we keep them around simply because they are beautiful in their own strange, imperfect way. After all, not every machine needs a purpose. Some just need a place where they are valued for what they are. Rather than for what we want them to be.
The question then isn’t why we can’t let go? But rather, why we ever tried to hold on so tightly in the first place. Because in the end, a machine that doesn’t work for you is not a failed investment. It’s simply a reminder that sometimes, it’s not the machine that’s flawed. It’s our inability to see beyond our own desires, to accept the hum of a device. We never took the time to truly understand.
Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info!
Read more from Junaid Khan