“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
If you’d like empirical evidence to support Pascal’s quip, I present to you the 2020 lockdown. “Sitting quietly in a room alone” was the one thing we found we could not do well—at least not the “quiet” part.
The global pandemic, confinement to our homes, the ticker on the news counting deaths, and the uncertainty of when it all would end made for a year most of us would just as soon forget. Individually and collectively, we made desperate attempts to get a handle on the situation. When we couldn’t, anxiety turned into frustration and irritation into outrage. When you’re used to having control and then it’s threatened, things get ugly.
The promise of control is the engine driving our post-Enlightenment lives. From education and career, to romance and marriage, to giving birth and parenting, to aging and dying, our late-modern ways of life reflect the desire to stay in as much control as possible. And understandably so. Control has many advantages.
The promise of control is the engine driving our post-Enlightenment lives.
The problem, however, as the philosopher Hartmut Rosa explains, isn’t control itself but when our quest for control “begins to permeate every aspect of life.” When we imagine we can plan, predict, manage, and execute our way to a happy life, several painful complications recur.
Scandal of Resistance
From birth through death, we’re driven by the ecstasy of control. We’re addicted to what Andy Crouch calls “easy everywhere.” The proliferation of new technology has rapidly given us more control without the need to develop accompanying wisdom and skills. If you want to learn to master a musical instrument or a difficult book, you’ll have to spend years of disciplined practice. Embracing resistance on the path to true freedom has long been part and parcel with gaining more control.
Digital technology, however, has offered control with minimal resistance. A quick swipe across my phone’s screen, and you’re in control. Whenever you feel the impulse, you can open a social media account to see what your “friends” are up to. If one of them writes something you don’t like, you unfollow. Resistance be gone! Two clicks and you can order almost anything imaginable. Frictionless. Log in and enjoy any song, show, or movie that has ever been produced. Simple. Want information about a book? Ask your phone. Need to write an important email? Get a chatbot to do it. Ah, we sit back and say to ourselves, it’s good to be king.
But when we imagine ourselves as monarchs with a magic touch, mutiny becomes our worst fear. Rosa observes that when the “categorical imperative of (late) modern decision-making is to always act in such a way that your share of the world is increased,” any pushback becomes an affront to your reign. You don’t need to live through the uncertainty of a pandemic to experience the sting of resistance. The pandemic only intensified the points of aggression we all know too well from our everyday lives.
Nature resists. We’re painfully aware that though we’ve learned to manipulate and mold nature to do our bidding, it seems to have a mind of its own. Hurricanes, floods, pestilence, and viruses still plague us. Death and destruction are always on the horizon.
Others resist. The late-modern default setting of always acting to “increase our share of the world” leads to the instrumentalization of relationships. Normally without realizing it, we begin to treat others as means rather than ends. But others painfully resist; it’s always to our dismay to find others using us as means to their own ends.
Our bodies resist. Hide those wrinkles or grays all you want; we can’t hide them from ourselves. We know time and entropy are winning and will publicly declare victory soon enough. Another day, another friend diagnosed with cancer. Our resistance to resistance will, in the end, be futile.
And when our habitual patterns are centered around “easy everywhere,” we never develop the wisdom, skills, and resilience traditionally formed by facing rather than attempting to evade daily microresistances.
When our habitual patterns are centered around ‘easy everywhere,’ we never develop the wisdom, skills, and resilience traditionally formed by facing rather than attempting to evade daily microresistances.
This scandalous mismatch between our modern quest for control and the reality of resistance generates frustration, rage, and despair. For the more control is our god, the more resistance is sacrilege.
With one word, the 20th-century philosopher Albert Camus captured how blasphemous the world’s rejection of our expectations feels: absurd. “The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” The more we live as if the world should be fully understandable to our minds, happiness fully achievable on our terms, and life agreeable to our demands, the more we oscillate between anger and anguish when life doesn’t cooperate.
Midas Touch
The absurdity we feel due to our heightened expectations for control and the strong resistance of reality drives us to spend more time on our devices. Humans resist. Nature resists. Society resists. Our bodies resist. Devices are different. Devices are designed to do our bidding.
Imagine you’re the last human alive, ruling over the world of high-functioning robots. The machines are programmed to serve you through conversation, food, and entertainment. Your wish is their command.
Despite getting whatever you want, whenever you wanted it, you’d eventually find this arrangement repellent. Why?
This mechanized interaction would be absent the deepest expressions of human love. Rosa argues that no matter how technologically advanced the bots, anything that “has no mind of [its] own” won’t resonate with us. We can’t receive true love from something we know is programmed to do our bidding. Vibrant relationships aren’t rooted in control but in the back and forth of uncontrolled interactions. The irony is that as we attempt to make and fill our lives with machines that act like us, we end up acting more like lifeless machines.
Our use of devices to communicate grants less resistance and more efficiency. Emails and texts allow us to get straight to the point. They form us to crave more efficient and predictable ways of life. And, as the research makes increasingly clear, they’re making us lonelier.
Consider what a more efficient relationship with your kids would mean. Or what a less vulnerable relationship with your spouse or best friend would look like. If our relationships with others prioritize usefulness and control, they will in one sense be “easier,” but they’ll also become shallow.
In our ecology of control, the fallout is that we fail to truly see and be seen. Nature is viewed as a resource to optimize rather than our home to live in, care for, and wonder at. Our bodies become treated as machines we optimize into submission. Life becomes mechanized. Less humane. More alienated.
This alienation contributes to two characteristic sicknesses of our age: depression and burnout. Like addicts, we mistake heavier doses of control for the cure to our sadness, speeding up in pursuit of self-mastery. Work, self-help, therapy, diet, fitness, travel ball, and vacations are presented as the remedy to our despair. And yet, as Byung-Chul Han explains, this way of life has produced a burnout society marked by despair and exhaustion.
In the famous Greek myth, King Midas is granted his wish to have a golden touch. The dream of possessing such power, however, quickly turns into a nightmare. For whatever he reaches for to make his own golden treasure also becomes a lifeless object. The modern world has given us kingly powers to claim and control. But the more we’ve achieved this magical touch, the more the world becomes dead to us. To cope, we become numb. If someone or something is trying to reach us from the outside, we’re less likely to feel it. As Rosa puts it, in our late-modern quest to control, we’re less able “to be called, to be reached.”
Boomerang of Uncontrollability
In July 2024, my family departed for a much-anticipated vacation. Traveling by plane to visit places far away, in this case from Alabama to New York, is one of the many examples of our extended reach. By flying aboard 50 tons of metal at 500 miles per hour, anywhere in the world is literally within our reach. What a time to be alive!
The modern world has given us kingly powers to claim and control. But the more we’ve achieved this magical touch, the more the world becomes dead to us. To cope, we become numb.
Little did we know we were about to experience a week of helplessness. A global software outage stranded crews, planes, and hundreds of thousands of passengers. As hours grew into days, the helplessness of passengers and airline staff became palpable. I still remember the ticket agent feebly hiding under his kiosk to avoid customers whose frustration had turned into rage. I confess the experience made me want to cuss too.
What a time to be alive.
One of the ironies of our present situation is that control can quickly morph into helplessness. Instead of a ratio in which the percentage of control goes up and the percentage of uncontrollability goes down, we experience the exponential growth of control and uncontrollability together. The result is that in one moment we feel like gods (what can’t we do?) and the next moment we feel like helpless ants marching (what other choice do we have?). The stress of riding this emotional roller coaster adds to the underlying feeling of chaos and futility.
Blame Game
The gap between our expectations and our reality, again, looms large. With our supertechnology, our vast knowledge, and our ability to get things done, we believe we should be able to live smoother and more peaceful lives. When we don’t, when life pushes back, someone, surely, must be to blame.
In the case of another school shooting, another passenger plane crash, another wildfire that destroys lives and homes, investigations open. In the case of politics, we blame the stupidity of the opposing party for the chaos. The religious blame the irreligious. The irreligious blame the religious. The poor blame the rich. The rich blame the other rich.
Someone, it seems, is always to blame.
The French critic Jacques Ellul saw this all coming 75 years ago. Whereas Rosa refers to our contemporary control problem, Ellul spoke of the victory of means over ends. Faced with a world that now feels dead to us, we concentrate ever more on the means of making “progress,” whatever that might mean. “We congratulate ourselves each time an airplane surpasses a speed record, and we make great efforts to succeed in going faster, as if speed were a good and sufficient goal in itself. But what is the point of saving time?” Ellul uncomfortably presses us: “Modern people—dehumanized through means, having become means—are, when they are given time and their life is preserved for them, like savages who are given a complex machine and whose hands lack the skill to use it.”
With this rather bleak assessment of our present situation, you might be tempted to dismiss Ellul as a boomer yelling at us to get off our devices. But if you sit with this quote, you’ll notice Ellul has buried seeds of hope within his biting critique.
We’ve been given wondrous machines. We have tools to help us live potentially healthier lives. We have technological gifts that could help us lead better lives. We have supercomputers in our pockets, flying machines we could get a seat on, and robots to do our bidding. Our parents have thrown us the keys. The Porsche is ours. What a time to be alive!
The problem is that we’ve never learned to drive. For we’ve opted out of the school of resistance.
Unable or unwilling to sit quietly to learn from resistance, to ponder a way to steer within the lines of reality, Ellul said, we have “set off at astronomically high speeds toward nowhere.” Along the way, we’ve been advised, as Camus put it, to just “imagine ourselves happy.” Yet it’s hard to imagine ourselves happy when we keep crashing into reality. “But what if we learned to sit quietly?” Pascal’s wager is that if we learn to slow down and zoom out, if we ask questions about life’s deepest pains and joys, and if we step out in vulnerability to embrace another way, we might discover we can learn from resistance. For she has much to teach us.
The absurdity of resistance, the shocking gap between the expectations for our lives and the uncontrollable chaos of the world, led Camus to deny any ultimate meaning—and any hope in a God who would ground such meaning.
Yet buried beneath Camus’s analysis is an intuition that could lead us in the opposite direction. Why do we expect anything different from the world? Why do we rail against chaos? In a world marked by nature “red in tooth and claw,” why would atoms and energy colliding randomly produce creatures who expect peace, harmony, and meaning? Why the mismatch to begin with?
It was Blaise Pascal, 300 years before Camus, who observed, “All the miseries of man but prove his greatness.”
No other animal feels the absurdity of existence. Our family dog, Otis, doesn’t loathe his mortality or attempt to suppress death by creating his own “cosmic significance,” as Ernest Becker famously laid bare about humans. Dogs are satisfied with their dogness. We humans sense that we should be more than we are.
This greatness also makes us miserable. For our ability to reign, to extend our reach, is accompanied by the distressing awareness that something has gone terribly wrong. Children starve. People are enslaved. Young girls are sexually exploited. The innocent are gunned down. Floods wipe away thousands. Murderous tyrants live peacefully into old age. We rightly sense these are evils we should try to exercise control to overturn. But we also know that as much as we try, the world resists. We’re like exiled kings residing in a foreign land, living among strangers who refuse to pay homage to our demands.
Worse than our inability to reign as “great lords” is the thought that when we do manage to seize control, we often make things worse. After all, it’s humans who enslave other humans, people who exploit creation and other creatures. Our ability to control nature has led to life-saving medicine and life-destroying weapons. The problem with the world isn’t simply that we can’t control it; the problem is that we often can. The disquieting thought isn’t just that the world resists our reach but that we often ruin what we reach for. Something has gone wrong with the world. Something has gone wrong with us.
The disquieting thought isn’t just that the world resists our reach but that we often ruin what we reach for. Something has gone wrong with the world. Something has gone wrong with us.
Pascal gets us right: “What a chimera then is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm; depositary of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe!”
The mismatch between our capacity for genius and our ethical aspirations, on the one hand, and our disintegration and alienation, on the other, is a disturbing reality of human existence. What best explains the absurdity of our situation?
And most importantly, what can we do about it?
Jesus’s School of Resistance
One day, a man ran up to Jesus to inquire how he might “inherit eternal life” (Mark 10:17). If there was ever someone who would have felt he knew how to pull the levers of control, it was this guy. Rich. Young. A ruler.
And apparently, as folks where I’m from say, he was “livin’ right.” When Jesus cited the final six of the Ten Commandments, the man confidently declared he had all those boxes checked. To his contemporaries, this man was “winning”—which is why Jesus’s resistance to him felt so absurd to the disciples:
And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. (vv. 21–22)
If our image of Jesus has drifted toward an ancient life coach who exists to affirm our quests to take life by the horns, this passage offers resistance. Formed by our “easy everywhere” world, we face the danger of Jesus too becoming a point of aggression we subconsciously evade—or worse, our religion becoming, as Nietzsche detected, a form of will to power.
The Jesus manipulated into our own image becomes just another means by which to pull the levers of control. “Fortunately, Jesus hates the people I hate, agrees with all of my political positions, and approves all my online takes.” Or in more ancient guise: “God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector” (Luke 18:11). While we may want a God who supports us in our delusions, that’s not what the Bible offers. And that’s good news. The Jesus found in the Gospels resists our attempt to colonize him. If we sit quietly with Jesus’s resistance, we might just come to discover the jarring love we need.
Jarring because at first glance, his resistance doesn’t feel like love. But “love” is exactly what the gospel tells us Jesus did by commanding the man to sell everything. Jesus could see that wealth had become this man’s god, and he knew the hell to which his devotion would eventually lead.
Money’s Spell
Money isn’t sought for what it is—we have no intrinsic desire for coins or paper. We’re drawn to it for the control and comfort it promises. It extends our reach and makes us feel less dependent: need help, hire someone; need a ride, pay for it; lose your job, draw on the stockpile. Money is the god that fixes our problems and soothes us to sleep.
Until it doesn’t.
Money enchants us to believe we can be kings unto ourselves—self-sustaining, unflappable, even invincible. But this spell exacts a price.
First, the autonomy we’ve purchased isolates us from relationships of mutual dependence. Money magically frees us from certain dependencies, but in doing so we lose touch with our humanity.
The frantic drive to earn our way to control numbs our ability to patiently attend to the human calling of knowing and being known. Devotion to money makes us like Oz’s tin man—heartless, or at least stony-hearted, less able to receive and give true love.
Second, no amount of money is enough to buy our way out of all life’s perils or shield us from the certainty of death. We bow down to money for comfort, but only the deluded reach for it with their dying breaths. Money is a cheap substitute for God.
This is why Jesus regularly drew sharp lines. Like a good doctor, he made the diagnosis plain: you can trust in God or depend on money for God-like control. No religious or moral veneer can disguise the choice. Because he loved the young ruler, Jesus named the cancer slowly eating away at his life.
Like a good doctor, Jesus made the diagnosis plain: You can trust in God or depend on money for God-like control.
Still today, we can respond to Jesus’s words by turning away sad, with our wealth and “control” in hand. In our story, the young ruler walked away. But he should’ve known better. For with all his religious scruples, he should’ve been well schooled in the ancient story of human control gone bad.
Ancient Story
In Genesis 1 and 2, God is in control. Unlike the other creatures, he doesn’t just speak humans into existence—he speaks with them, calling his image-bearers to walk with him as vice-regents. Humans are made to both commune and control. And yet we’re also made from the dust of the ground: contingent, unable to create or sustain ourselves, dependent on food from the earth, heat from the sun, oxygen from air. To be human is to depend.
God repeatedly declares his creation as good, but then, as if to get our attention, we hear God declare something is not good: “It was not good for the man to be alone” (2:18). While God is never lacking or lonely, we humans lacked something vital on our own. We need others. We depend on others. We were made for communities of mutual love and trust.
What is remarkable for our purposes is how the story maps onto our experience as humans still today. We pursue control, we seek to love and be loved, and no matter how much we hide it, we feel our own vulnerability.
We don’t get far before the absurd slithers onto the scene. With a twist of the tongue, our ancestors are tempted by anarchy: God is a cosmic killjoy who has set limits because he’s afraid “[we] will be like God, knowing good and evil” (3:5). The temptation is control without communion.
Adam and Eve rise to reign on their own terms, seizing the gift while denying the Giver.
When communion with the Source of life is severed, death becomes inevitable. Shame drives them to hide. Alienation from God breeds estrangement from each other: Adam plays the blame game—“the woman whom you gave to be with me” (v. 12)—and the most central relationship of mutual dependence is plagued by power struggle. Violence, exploitation, and chaos invade God’s good creation. Genesis tells a story we know too well.
Our late-modern quest to bend reality to our whims—our “will to power,” as Nietzsche praised it—has, with the acceleration of technology, produced more violence and death than any period in history. Genesis saw us coming.
Yet the ancient story shows philosophical nuance. Power itself isn’t the enemy; we were designed to control. Dominion is our calling, and it only goes bad when severed from the call to commune. When loving dependence is denied, the pursuit of control turns us into rebel-kings, and all of creation pays the price.
In each of the synoptic Gospels, immediately before Jesus’s encounter with the young ruler, is the story of Jesus’s meeting with a class of people whose posture toward the world is completely opposite from that of our wealthy go-getter:
And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them, and the disciples rebuked them. But when Jesus saw it, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them. (Mark 10:13–16)
The children receiving Jesus’s blessing stand in sharp contrast to the overachieving ruler who walks away sad. By reading these passages side by side, Jesus’s message becomes as clear as it is countercultural.
While the rich young ruler walked right up to Jesus, the disciples tried to block the children’s access—overzealous personal assistants optimizing his time, sifting out distractions, recognizing the usefulness of a ruler and the uselessness of a child. Taken captive by the cultural logic of their day, they needed Jesus’s counter: Instead of pulling levers of power and accumulating wealth to work the system, they are to “receive the kingdom like a little child.”
Children aren’t embarrassed by their neediness; they embrace it. Freed of the burden of earning access, they receive Jesus’s unhurried, unmerited attention.
Jesus’s embrace of childlike dependence reaches back to Genesis. As created beings, our dependence isn’t a bug—it’s a feature. Being driven into the hands of our Creator enables us to hold our neighbors’ hands and cultivate the earth with our fingers. Dependence leads to communion.
In a world gone mad, the temptation is to plaster over our dependency and numb ourselves against the pain that comes with true communion. Control without vulnerability is a way of coping with absurdity, and it sometimes “works” for a while, as it must have for the rich young ruler. But subtracting vulnerability subtracts the love we were created for.
Notice the kingly language (“possess the kingdom”) that accompanies the childlike reception. Jesus isn’t negating God’s original call to control. Instead, by calling us back to reality, he echoes our creational design in Genesis 1–2 to exercise dominion but as dependent creatures. The way of Christ is a curious blend of vulnerability with authority, communion with control.
Commune and Control
After the ruler walked away, Jesus looked at his followers and said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:23). The disciples were still in shock—students in Jesus’s school of resistance, not yet able to receive the diagnosis as a curse. Peter spoke up for the group, sadness and desperation tinging his voice: “We have left everything to follow you!” (vv. 28).
Jesus could have dismissed the concern. Instead, as with the rich young ruler, he looked at them and loved them. The hard diagnosis had been given; now the medicine of hope:
Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first.” (vv. 29–31)
The promise isn’t only a kingdom in the life to come—notice the words “in the present age.” Persecutions and all, this is the life worth living, exponentially better than the numb deadness of building Nietzschean kingdoms by our will to power.
We’ve seen how Genesis explains and anticipates the world we find ourselves in. When we pursue control and hide from a dependent relationship with our Creator, others, and nature, chaos ensues. The problem is cyclical: The more vulnerable life feels, the harder we buckle down to become invulnerable, doubling down on certitude or cynicism. As Justin Bailey puts it, “Certitude is an attempt to see everything (so that nothing unexpected can occur); cynicism is an attempt to see through everything (so that no one can betray our trust).” Both reject the risk that a loving relationship requires—and so they reject the “life of joining, belonging, connection, and intimacy” modeled for us by Jesus Christ.
Jesus perfectly displays the human calling to both commune and control. And in his words to Peter and his other disciples, Jesus reminds us that this calling is the only life worth living. No longer on a quest to make sure everything and everyone is circling around us, we become free to reign according to our design—radiating outward in loving dependence on God, others, children, homes, and fields.
The Gospel Coalition