DE Weekly: Traffic, Taoism, & the Illusion of Control
Below is an archived email originally sent on June 1, 2026.
Traffic, Taoism, & the Illusion of Control
Imagine you leave for work one morning, hop in your car, and take your usual route, only this time, you end up in a standstill traffic jam. The cars ahead of you are not moving, the cars behind you are not moving, and you are not moving.
You try switching lanes: the other lanes move no faster. You try searching the horizon for the cause of the slowdown: you cannot see anything.
You realize you have to sit there and wait for the traffic to clear, but you begin to imagine the consequences of being late for work. Your body tenses and your mind races, and you grow agitated, cursing the other drivers, the city, everything.
All this time, however, the traffic jam remains the same. It is what it is. Your reaction does not change anything. All the worrying, tension, and agitation you exude changes absolutely nothing about the situation except make you exhausted.
I sourced the above scenario from a short podcast I listened to recently from the Life Wisdom - Words of Taoism Substack page.
In the episode, the author talks about different areas of life represented by the traffic jam described in the story, namely, tension, action, control, and mastery.
Let’s start with control.
It is part of our human nature to try and control what we cannot; the traffic jam is a metaphor for life itself. We struggle against something that we didn’t cause but can’t solve, either: it simply just is, and we struggle to accept that.
Why do we seek to control things outside ourselves, outside our control? For an illusion of mastery. Mastery of our lives, of our surroundings, the people around us, indeed, of the very world itself.
The only problem is we cannot master these things, because we cannot control them.
The illusion of control that we all desire and all strive for on some level (I can certainly admit I have tried in my own life) is not confined to one stretch of time in particular; no, it pervades all three of the past, present, and future.
When it comes to the past, we think about what we should have said to that person in that conversation, what we should have done in a certain situation that would have provided a better outcome, and how we can rewrite the past.
In the present, we guess at the judgments of other people––what they think about us, what decision they are going to make––and mull over how to figure them out.
For the future, we obsessively make plans, as if we could bend reality to our will.
Our desire to control that which is not ours to control, be it in the past, present, or future, yields the same result: nothing changes.
There was a line spoken by the author of the podcast episode I liked. It went:
“The email arrives when it arrives. Others think what they think. The past remains what it was. Only our fatigue increases. Yet we know, somewhere, that our agitation is futile.”
And yet, we continue. We refuse to accept our powerlessness, continue to struggle against what escapes our grasp, and reach ever further for that illusion of control.
We confuse control with mastery, and thus, tension with action. We think if we are worried and anxious to change our situation it will happen. But it might not.
Conversely, we see letting go as a surrender, a resignation to forces beyond our control. But it is not. In “letting go,” we relax. What remains as a result?
When we loosen our reins on the illusion of control, we bring ourselves out of the anxiety of the past and the worries of the future, and into the present. We act where we can act, but not toward what exceeds us.
We echo the sentiment of the Stoic philosophers, in many ways the predecessors of major ideas of existential thought, when we accept that we can control what depends on us, but not what does not.
Instead of gripping the wheel during the traffic jam, focus on what you can change. You cannot change the situation, but you can change your experience of it.
The traffic jam––life––will not have changed. But your relationship with it can. Stop gripping that which commands nothing in life.
Let go, forget the outcome. Act with intent. Instead of trying to plow through the obstacles in your path, move around them. Find a way.
Although the Taoism explored in this particular newsletter and Existentialism approach the issues discussed herein from different perspectives, they nevertheless seek to confront the same issues.
Both philosophies call us to embrace the uncertainty and absurdity of life by focusing on what we can effect within ourselves.
Both philosophies call us to recognize that our perception of a situation or a condition can often overpower that thing-in-itself and change our understanding of it.
Lastly, both philosophies call us––whether through struggle or an easy flow––to direct our consciousness to the right places.
“You never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.” — Alan Watts
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
When I wrote this one, I had an older one I had written in mind. I kind of see this one as building off that one. Go check it out if you’d like.
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