The core difficulty of this human drive is vividly illustrated through a striking metaphor involving a Rubik’s Cube. Hauptman recalls meeting a young speed-cuber who possessed the remarkable skill of solving a scrambled Rubik’s Cube in just sixty seconds. While the individual was personally friendly and pleasant, Hauptman found himself harbor an unexpected resentment toward him on a purely metaphorical level. The speed-cuber represented an enviable mastery over chaos that felt starkly absent from daily life. For most people, life feels far less like a puzzle waiting to be cleanly solved and far more like an endlessly complex, insoluble cube where attempting to arrange one side into a uniform color invariably scrambles the remaining sides into a multicolored mess.
This dynamic manifests continuously in everyday routines. Individuals routinely encounter conflicting priorities that defy simultaneous resolution. One can choose to spend time seeing clients or attend to domestic chores around the house; focus on spending quality time with family or dedicate hours to writing a book; enjoy dinner outings with friends or carefully monitor personal weight; stay up to date with professional reading or unwind with a mystery novel. The underlying reality is that no one can accomplish everything at once, forcing individuals into a continuous cycle of daily tradeoffs.
According to Hauptman, this dynamic extends beyond individual daily schedules and reflects how change operates in the broader world. When people attempt to aggressively force reality to conform to their specific expectations, reality frequently pushes back. This phenomenon is a central theme in timeless storytelling, serving as the foundational core of cautionary tales across generations. Mythological and literary figures like King Midas and Ebenezer Scrooge, as well as modern pop-culture narratives like Jurassic Park, illustrate the severe backlash that occurs when humans try to exercise absolute dominion over outcomes, natural forces, or fate.
The urge to force reality into alignment is what Hauptman classifies as an addiction to control. Clarifying the terminology, Hauptman emphasizes that being a "control addict" does not necessarily mean being overtly bossy, pushy, or domineering toward others. Instead, control in this context refers to the deep, fundamental human longing to make reality cooperate—the instinctive desire to force people, complex situations, and unpredictable circumstances to bend to personal needs, desires, and expectations.
Through years of clinical observation and personal reflection on human behavior, Hauptman identifies three distinct paradoxes that lie hidden within the pursuit of control:
First, the more control a person feels they need to maintain, the less in control they ultimately feel.
Second, the harder an individual tries to exert control over other people, the more those efforts compel those same people to exert control back in response.
Third, to achieve control in one specific area of life, a person must inevitably surrender control in another.
It is this third paradox that highlights the fundamental flaw in treating life like a Rubik’s Cube. The persistent effort to secure total control over one specific domain frequently triggers an unexpected loss of stability elsewhere. Clinical and real-world examples of this dynamic are abundant across society:
Consider the individual who uses alcohol as a mechanism to regulate difficult internal feelings, only to eventually lose control to the overwhelming demands of addiction itself.
Consider the ambitious business executive who successfully achieves immense status, wealth, and career milestones, yet simultaneously experiences severe emotional estrangement from his wife, children, and extended family.
Consider the dedicated mother who transforms her children into the sole focus of her existence, only to wake up years later profoundly disconnected from her husband, to the point where meaningful communication between them has effectively ceased.
Consider the man struggling with depression who spends years successfully hiding his internal pain from everyone around him, only to find himself one morning entirely overwhelmed by exhaustion and physically incapable of getting out of bed.
Despite observing this third paradox repeatedly in both personal experience and therapeutic contexts, acknowledging its truth remains an ongoing challenge. Human nature inherently yearns for conflict-free living—a state where one can write the book and spend endless time with family, earn substantial income and take ample time to rest and play, or enjoy rich foods like bagels and pizza and simultaneously watch the numbers on the bathroom scale decrease.
There is an innate, stubborn, and almost childish element within the human psyche that simply wants what it wants. This part of the mind expects reality to yield, feeling hurt and indignant when those demands go unmet. It seeks choices without consequence, desiring to have its cake and eat it too.
However, recognizing the underlying structure of control allows for a significant internal shift. Rather than viewing the scrambled sides of life’s metaphorical cube as evidence of personal inadequacy or failure, individuals can begin to view them simply as the natural footprint of conscious choice.
For much of his life, Hauptman notes that he interpreted unmanaged obligations as personal shortcomings. A messy house meant he had failed to clean it; time spent away from writing meant time wasted; time spent writing meant essential duties were being neglected; eating a slice of pizza induced guilt over breaking a diet, while skipping it generated a frustrating sense of deprivation. One side of the cube was always scrambled, silently accusing him of falling short.
Reframing this perspective transforms the scrambled sides into quiet reminders of intentional choices. Every clear "yes" to one priority carries an implicit "no" to another. A highly productive writing session inevitably means household chores remain untouched for the day, just as a day dedicated entirely to managing domestic chores means the manuscript remains unwritten. Every choice comes with an unavoidable cost, a reality that seems obvious in theory but remains exceedingly difficult to accept in practice.
The power of this psychological shift is demonstrated through a personal medical encounter Hauptman experienced during a routine physical examination. During the visit, his physician ran an electrocardiogram that revealed a minor irregularity—a "blip" suggesting the possibility of a transient ischemic attack, or mini-stroke. Though Hauptman felt entirely fine physically, his doctor instructed him to go directly to the hospital emergency room for evaluation.
Upon arriving at the hospital, medical staff placed him on a gurney and parked him in a busy hallway, where he remained for four hours while doctors conducted tests. The sudden hospitalization forced him to cancel six client sessions, reassure his worried wife over the phone, and confront the unsettling uncertainty of prospective medical bills, all while lying helpless on a gurney in a corridor.
In earlier years, such an abrupt disruption and total loss of agency over his schedule would have triggered severe frustration, acute anxiety, and intense anger over the loss of control. Yet, facing the situation in the hospital hallway, Hauptman experienced a surprising alternative reaction: he simply closed his eyes and took a peaceful, one-hour nap.
This quiet response revealed a profound shift in perspective. The part of the mind that continually demands absolute control had, at least in that moment, become willing to accept unavoidable tradeoffs without bitter protest. It reflected a growing willingness to embrace reality as it presented itself, accepting that falling short of total control is not a sign of personal failure.
Ultimately, life is not a Rubik’s Cube designed to be neatly aligned across all six sides in a matter of seconds. Embracing the perspective highlighted by Sylvia Boorstein allows individuals to release the exhausting pressure of trying to manage everything at once. By recognizing that no one can do everything, people can learn to navigate life’s competing demands with greater compassion, accepting that a scrambled side is not a flaw, but simply the natural result of being human.
