Our unconscious contract with the universe: If I work hard enough, I will be happy

Many of us hold an unconscious contract with the universe that goes something like this: “if I work hard, I will achieve my goals and be happy” (... and perhaps even more unconsciously, “I will be loved and accepted”). 

For those who like logic tables, this belief can be thought of as P → Q. “If I work hard, I will achieve my goals”. We may accept this belief as universally true as the truism “if Fido is a dog, then Fido is an animal”.  

We can sometimes be lucky enough make it through the first decades of life without substantially challenging this contract, and perhaps without even noticing it. You study hard and get the job; you practice hard and make the team; the list goes on.

But eventually, sooner or later, the chaos of the universe will catch up with each one of us. Something will happen to us that we really do not like. “I didn’t make the team”; “I didn’t get the promotion”; “I got laid off”; or even “I have a terminal illness”; “My partner died”. Eventually, we are forced to accept that there are things we simply cannot control. 

Too often we compound the necessary grief of these real losses with the unnecessary shame about what we think these losses mean about us. Because as we know from school, if P → Q is true, then ~Q → ~P is also true: “If Fido is not an animal" (~Q), then "Fido is not a dog” (~P).

And so when we believe our original contract as truth ("If I work hard, I will succeed"), then when we don’t succeed, we conclude that it is our fault. This might sound like: "If I had tried harder I could have saved our marriage”; “If I had delivered a better presentation I would have been promoted”; “If I had not asked her to run that errand, she would still be alive today”. 

Here's an alternative. When things don’t go how we hoped or planned, we can see it as an invitation to reexamine the unconscious contracts we have made with the universe. 

To honestly ask ourselves, is it really the case P → Q? If a person does their best at everything, will everything always turn out the way they would like? When phrased that way, the answer is obvious and resounding “of course not”.

We all know that the universe is chaotic; we all know that cars crash and lightning strikes; we all know that things happen every moment of every day which have nothing to do with the people they happen to. But it is so easy to forget it when it comes to our own lives, as expressed so beautifully in this passage from Tolstoy's “Death of Ivan Ilyich”:

The syllogism he had learned from Kiesewetter's Logic: "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal," had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius — man in the abstract — was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others. He had been little Vanya, with a mama and a papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with the toys, a coachman and a nurse, afterwards with Katenka and will all the joys, griefs, and delights of childhood, boyhood, and youth. What did Caius know of the smell of that striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond of? Had Caius kissed his mother's hand like that, and did the silk of her dress rustle so for Caius? Had he rioted like that at school when the pastry was bad? Had Caius been in love like that? Could Caius preside at a session as he did? "Caius really was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my thoughts and emotions, it's altogether a different matter. It cannot be that I ought to die. That would be too terrible." - Tolstoy

It is hard to accept that things will happen to us we cannot control. But the difficulty in accepting it doesn’t make it any less true. We need to grieve those losses, and eventually accept our new reality so that we can take a clear eyed view of what is next for us. 

This allows us to limit the pain to the actual loss (“I lost my job and need a new source of income to support my family”; “I didn’t make the track team because my sprint time was too slow”) and not compound it with unnecessary and untrue shame (“I lost my job because I was unworthy”; “I didn’t make the track team because I never do anything right”).   

To be clear, I am not saying that everything is externally caused; we of course often play a role in what happens to us, and there is often much valuable personal learning to be gained from setbacks. But I am saying that when we overestimate our degree of control, we can get stuck in unhelpful shame. And it is that very shame which, ironically enough, impedes our ability to learn and grow from our setbacks.

By acknowledging the limits of our control in an endlessly complex universe, we can redirect our energy away from internal self-judgment and toward the reality of our current world, looking out with clear eyes to find our best next step.