Control

There’s a concept in psychology, locus of control, that refers to the degree of control we believe we have over our lives.

The theory is that some of us see the world as a whirling mass of unknowable, external forces over which we have little or no influence, while others are more likely to perceive things as being within reach and manipulatable—we can pull levers, shift stones, build stuff, and reorganize things.

Most of us exist somewhere in between these two extremes, neither feeling...