Passive vs Active Challenges
What does it mean to feel in control of your life?
It’s not too often that you hear someone explain something exactly as you lived it, however this happened to me just the other day. I was listening to a podcast, as I often do, I like to fill my spare time, such as those moments when driving a car or cooking food, listening to something educational.
YouTube or a podcast is often a part of my daily routine; I find it interesting to always be learning about different things even if I’m not actively practising what I’m learning. A big part of my curiosity towards life comes from the feeling that the more I know about the world the better I can place myself within it. So while people often learn for a specific purpose such as to speak another language or to get a certain job, I just like to learn because it’s a big world out there and I want to know how to be the best me. I truly believe that I need to understand as much as possible about the world in order to be the best me, as myself and everything I know as life is contained within this world.
This rampant curiosity often takes me to weird and wonderful places, sometimes I learn next to nothing as my attempt to educate myself becomes little more than mild entertainment, but once in a while someone drops a real gem. Today’s topic is one of these moments.
Disclaimer: While the topic of this essay was inspired by what was said on a podcast, my writing here at InThirdPerson is always about my lived experience. I don’t talk about things I haven’t personally experienced and especially don’t just regurgitate other people’s material.
What Makes a Challenge Passive or Active?
I find each person’s relationship to challenge so interesting. Some of us fight so hard to get away from them that we end up creating new ones, while others drown themselves in unnecessary burdens for the thrill of it. Who right? Depends who you ask, I guess.
My job is not to decide who’s right, whether we should run from or take on as many challenges as possible. What I want to talk about is the role that challenge plays in our lives, and how these challenges relate to our sense of control in life.
Control is a fascinating topic in and of itself. Does one really have control over their life? Or is control just an illusion? Both great questions, but neither is the topic of this essay. Sense of control is what we’re talking about today, the feeling you have about how in control you are of your life. Because it’s this feeling that’s what’s important. And there are two important variables that play into this sense of control: passive and active challenges.
Passive challenges are the challenges that throw themselves at you without you asking and especially not your permission. Think along the lines of bills, severe weather, family problems, and health scares. The kinds of challenges that require your attention without you having set them into motion.
The alternative to passive challenges are active challenges. Think running a marathon, reading a book in a few days, following a strict diet, or chasing your dreams. The kinds of things that nobody makes you do, you just challenge yourself because you want to.
Life is the interplay between these passive and active challenges; we all know this. It’s the dance between doing the things we NEED to do and the things we WANT to do.
What I find so interesting is not the divide in the nature of these two types of challenges, but rather the way they interplay to create our sense of control in life.
How Does Challenge Relate to Our Sense of Control?
A life full of passive challenges would be one which feels utterly out of control. Imagine from the moment you woke up to the minute you went to bed you weren’t able to spend even a minute doing what you would like. Life would feel utterly out of control, as if you were a victim to your circumstances.
Alternatively, imagine if from the minute you woke up to the minute you went to bed you were able to do whatever you wanted with no restrictions. Pursue any dream, chase any goal, reach for the stars as they say. Unfortunately, and I do mean unfortunately, that’s just not reality. There is no life of pure active challenges, no matter how fantastic it would be to be able to do whatever you please each and every day. Regardless, if you could that would be a life that felt well and truly within your control.
So what should one make of a life sandwiched between the chaos of these passive and active challenges? Well, the answer looks different to everyone. I was unfortunate enough to make the mistake that many people do when they feel that their life has become too overwhelming and out of control: run.
We’re mistaken to assume that to regain a sense of control over life we must run from the passive challenges. That which we run from only chases us for longer; heed the warning.
As a teenager growing into an adult, I did the thing that many others do and that’s to assume that the solution to the sense of out of control-ness that I felt was to run from the passive challenges that adulthood brought with it. To try to escape the passive challenges in order to escape the sense that my life was increasingly becoming out of my control. Unfortunately that’s just part of the transition to adulthood, life asks a lot of us in that time, many things that we can’t simply refuse, despite my best efforts.
What I know now that I didn’t understand at the time is that when life feels out of control the solution is actually to create more challenges. Sure it sounds counterintuitive, but the logic is that this “sense of being out of control” stems from the majority of your life being passive challenges, and if you can actively take on new challenges, challenges of your own choosing, the percentage of your life that is passive (out of control feeling) goes down.
The more you’re able to populate your life with chosen challenges that give you a sense of purpose and control in life, the less of a weight the passive challenges have. Active challenges, while still challenges, give you control over your life, and if you can fill your life with those active challenges, such as trying to hit a personal best or going for your master’s degree, then you’re likely to feel more in control than not.
Life asks all of us for many of the same things: fights with those close to us, rent, health issues, losing our jobs, sick days, and you get the point. All of us have to deal with the same crap, but if we bowed down and said “that’s hard enough, I’ve got nothing more to give” your whole life would be made up of those passive challenges. But when you say “hey, I know all of this stuff sucks, but I’m going to do all of that and some more, some more of what I want to do, because why should my whole life be just the things I don’t even want to do?” you’ve found the key.
The sense of control we feel in life comes not from running away from the challenges we don’t choose, but from deciding to take on more that we can choose.
The Solution
Those who take on the most active challenges may have an objectively harder life, but they also have a greater sense of control over their life. This sense of control leads to a greater sense of self-worth and personal empowerment which ultimately makes the work easier.
Passive challenges, which were once your whole life, soon turn into just tasks that get in the way of the active challenges you desire to achieve. The things that once made you feel out of control have now become the very things you need to achieve in order to get to a place of control.
I have a motto that I use all the time, I say “go through to get out.”
What “go through to get out” means is that instead of trying to escape or skirt around your predicament, you jump right in and power your way through it to get out. It’s natural to want to escape, to feel fear, to try and run, but I’ve found that often the best way out is through.
To see the passive challenges life asks of you as the stepping stones on the path to achieving the things you actually desire. Because while we can’t control the passive challenges that come our way, we can give ourselves a good reason to deal with them. That would be the active challenges.
It feels good to accomplish a goal, realise a dream, or turn an idea into reality. The only problem with this is that often the path to these active challenges is filled with passive challenges. However, it’s the sense of purpose given by the active challenges that can drive you to work through the passive challenges, a necessary step on the path to achieving the things you desire and regaining a sense of control over your life.
Obviously it’s not that enticing to tell someone that they should make their life harder; I get that. But the reality is that life is either easier and out of control (I would argue that’s not even easier), or harder and in your control. You don’t get to pick your passive challenges, but you can take on as many active challenges as your heart desires.
The key is finding the balance between the two. Life shouldn’t be so hard that you willingly snow yourself under, but it also doesn’t have to be a life guided by the demands of others. Somewhere in the middle is a sweet spot, the spot where you sacrifice some of your time to do what needs to be done, and the rest goes to the things you truly desire.
One’s sense of control comes not from trying to escape life’s challenges, but from willingly taking on more.
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