For licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist Steve Hauptman, this struggle is both a professional focus and a deeply personal reality. Hauptman, the author of Monkeytraps: Why We Try to Control Everything and How We Can Stop, recalls an encounter with a young speed-cuber—someone capable of solving a Rubik’s Cube in under sixty seconds. While the young man was friendly and pleasant, Hauptman admits to feeling a profound sense of envy that bordered on resentment. The resentment was not directed at the individual himself, but at what he represented on a metaphorical level. To Hauptman, life has long felt like an insoluble Rubik’s Cube, a puzzle where attempting to bring order to one side inevitably scrambles the color alignment on all the others.
This dynamic plays out endlessly in daily life. Hauptman notes that no matter how organized or diligent an individual attempts to be, it remains impossible to keep every aspect of existence in perfect alignment simultaneously. A person can choose to see clients or attend to domestic chores; spend quality time with family or focus on writing a book; enjoy a social dinner with friends or strictly monitor their weight; stay current with professional literature or unwind with light fiction. The inescapable reality is that no one can do everything at once. Life requires an endless series of trade-offs, where every single choice demands a corresponding sacrifice.
This tension between human desire and external reality extends far beyond individual daily schedules. In the broader world, the more aggressively people attempt to force life to meet their specific expectations, the more forcefully life tends to push back. This dynamic is a central motif in storytelling throughout history, serving as the foundation for classic cautionary tales ranging from King Midas and Ebenezer Scrooge to modern narratives like Jurassic Park. In each instance, characters attempt to assert ultimate control over their circumstances, only to find that their efforts trigger unintended consequences that shatter their original goals.
In his clinical work and personal reflection, Hauptman frames this behavioral pattern as a form of addiction to control. While the word "control" often evokes images of bossy or domineering personalities, Hauptman defines it more broadly as a fundamental human drive. It is the deep-seated desire to make reality cooperate—to compel people, situations, and external outcomes to align neatly with personal needs, desires, and expectations. According to Hauptman, virtually everyone struggles with some degree of this tendency, operating under the implicit assumption that with enough effort, reality can be brought under complete command.
Through years of studying this psychological phenomenon, Hauptman identified three central paradoxes that govern human attempts at control. The first paradox dictates that the greater a person’s need for control, the less in control they actually feel. Because the external world is inherently unpredictable, the demand for complete certainty creates an ongoing state of anxiety and vulnerability. The second paradox concerns interpersonal relationships: the harder an individual attempts to control another person, the more that effort provokes resistance, effectively forcing the other person to exert control in return.
It is the third paradox, however, that directly explains the frustration inspired by the speed-cuber: to gain control in one area of life, a person must inevitably relinquish control in another. This principle of mandatory trade-offs operates as an unyielding law of human experience, yet it is one that people routinely resist. Hauptman points to numerous common scenarios where the desperate effort to master one facet of life causes another critical area to collapse.
Consider the individual who turns to alcohol to manage overwhelming emotions, attempting to maintain internal stability only to lose control over their reliance on the substance itself. Similarly, a high-powered corporate executive may achieve immense success, financial security, and status in the workplace, but does so at the cost of becoming emotionally estranged from their spouse, children, and extended family. In domestic life, a parent might make their children the exclusive center of their existence, only to discover over time that this hyper-focus has created a deep wedge in their marriage, leaving them virtually disconnected from their partner. In another instance, an individual struggling with depression might spend years successfully masking their pain from the outside world, only to wake up one morning completely exhausted and physically unable to get out of bed.
Despite observing this third paradox repeatedly in both clinical practice and personal experience, Hauptman acknowledges how difficult it is to internalize its lesson. The human mind naturally harbors a desire for opposing outcomes to co-exist without friction. People want to write a manuscript while simultaneously devoting ample time to family; they want to pursue career growth while taking time to rest and play; they want to enjoy food like bagels and pizza while watching the number on the bathroom scale decrease.
However, a meaningful psychological shift occurs when an individual stops interpreting the scrambled side of the cube as evidence of personal failure. For much of his life, Hauptman admits that he viewed incomplete tasks or conflicting priorities as proof that he was messing up. If the house was disorganized, he felt he should have spent time cleaning it. If he wasn’t writing, he felt he was wasting precious time; yet if he was writing, he felt guilty for neglecting domestic responsibilities. Eating a slice of pizza felt like a failure of self-discipline, while skipping it felt like a frustrating deprivation. In every scenario, an unaligned side of the cube seemed to offer an accusation.
Over time, Hauptman began to reframe these moments of imbalance not as failures, but as gentle reminders of deliberate choices. Every "yes" extended to one priority contains an implicit "no" to another. A productive writing session means household chores must wait; a dedicated day spent cleaning and organizing means the manuscript remains untouched. Every choice carries a distinct cost, a concept that appears obvious on paper but remains remarkably difficult to accept in practice.
This difficulty stems from a stubborn, almost instinctual part of human nature that demands choices without cost. It is the childish or addicted element within the psyche that insists on having its cake and eating it too, reacting with hurt or anger when reality fails to satisfy every competing desire. While the longing to see all six faces of the life cube fall perfectly into place may never entirely disappear, progress lies in recognizing that human existence is fundamentally different from a mechanical puzzle. Life is not a Rubik’s Cube waiting to be solved.
This theoretical shift was put to a real-world test during a routine medical examination. During a standard physical, Hauptman’s physician ran an electrocardiogram and detected a subtle anomaly—a blip suggesting the possibility of a transient ischemic attack, or mini-stroke. Though Hauptman felt entirely healthy, his doctor directed him to go immediately to the hospital emergency room for evaluation.
Upon arriving at the hospital, Hauptman was placed on a gurney and parked in a hallway, where he remained for four hours while medical staff conducted tests. The sudden disruption forced him to cancel six client sessions, reassure his anxious wife over the phone, face uncertainty regarding the financial cost of the emergency visit, and endure hours of waiting in a busy medical environment.
In earlier years, such an unexpected loss of control would have triggered intense frustration, worry, or anger. Yet, to his own surprise, Hauptman responded to the prolonged wait by taking a restful, one-hour nap right there on the gurney. The experience marked a moment of personal transformation, proving that the underlying urge to control had yielded to a genuine willingness to accept trade-offs without resentment.
Ultimately, this shift reflects the essence of Sylvia Boorstein’s perspective on enlightenment. Making peace with life does not require solving every problem or bringing every competing demand into perfect balance. Rather, it comes from recognizing that failing to conquer reality is not a personal failure, acknowledging that no one can do everything, and learning to say with sincerity: "Well, this isn’t what I want, but it’s what I got, so okay."
