Surrendering To Structure

Trading Coherence for the Performance of Self

I believe the issue with people today—especially those in my age group and younger—is that they’re fixated on the idea that someone or something is controlling them. Many are stuck in a reflexive posture against whatever they perceive as holding power over them. This partly arises from growing up in uncertain times, but it’s also the result of ideas inherited from academic institutions that spent decades deconstructing “systems of power” and dismantling shared frameworks—only to replace them with a fragmented vision of individual liberty, one that often resembles isolated enclaves of ego rather than genuine autonomy. But this wasn’t a true replacement. It didn’t offer coherence or direction. It offered a void. And from that void, chaos and disorder emerged to occupy the space. This became the new template for how many of us now perceive the world.

In trying to resolve the psychological fallout of this postmodern unraveling¹—along with the gnawing sense of being controlled—we’ve adopted poorly calibrated, indignant, and low-resolution ways of expressing what we think is independence. But this isn’t an independence forged through wisdom, temperance, perspective, or any of the Aristotelian virtues.² Instead, we’ve conflated suspicion with vigilance, defiance with clarity, and we call that maturity.

What is produced is a generation of escapists—people who cannot handle life as it unfolds without their consent. But life doesn’t wait for consent. It moves with or without you. The need to control its terms turns any imposed structure into a perceived threat. People now interpret order not as a scaffold but as a form of coercion. They miss that life itself is a cybernetic, self-correcting process—one that must be engaged with, not overridden.³ It requires just enough tension, just enough stress, and just enough uncertainty to keep us adaptive. That stress is not the enemy; it is the very material through which the psyche moderates and makes meaning. However, too many lack the internal structure to regulate those responses. So, their attention remains fixated on what’s controlling them rather than on what they can actually influence. This fosters an external locus of control—a self-perception that is always at odds with the world. ⁴Always resisting. Always pushing away. Always blaming the external world for what is, at root, an internal tension.

So, they’re never truly “ready” to experience the unfolding of life, because they can’t wield it. So, they run. They delay. They “wait for the right moment,” mistaking endless self-work for true preparedness—conflating introspection with resilience, and control with maturity. In doing so, they miss out on love, connection, friendship, and opportunity—not because these things aren’t available, but because they feel unfamiliar, even threatening. Internally chaotic, they often interpret steadiness as suspicious, and instead gravitate toward love that demands they prove their worth. When it collapses, as it often does, the fallout becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: more proof that they are unlovable or incapable of genuine connection.

Over time, these patterns don’t just shape behavior—they solidify identity. They lie to others not merely to protect an image, but to preserve a self-concept built on the illusion of control. They deflect responsibility not because they lack morals, but because accountability feels like annihilation. They retreat into narcissistic forms of spirituality—frameworks that inflate their sense of moral insight while distancing them from the uncomfortable, formative work of building coherence within and between others. They begin to confuse detachment with depth, and dissociation with spiritual awakening.

This isn’t connection. It’s measured psychosis posing as transcendence.

The ability to form relationships, sustain connections, and be truly present isn’t innate—it’s cultivated through practice, and that practice requires the presence of other people. These cannot be effectively achieved in isolation.

If all this needs to be distilled, it comes down to the illusion of control. We are reaching the outer limits of what this illusion can sustain. And that may be why we’re seeing a slow return to religious institutions—places that require individuals to take an active role in their own spiritual development.⁵ Places where transcendence is not abstract, but earned through structure, ritual, and endurance.

I often think my generation is stuck in a kind of arrested adolescence. The problem is that life, like all systems, is subject to entropy—the gradual drift toward disorder unless energy is actively invested in maintaining structure. And entropy doesn’t wait for personal growth. It keeps moving. The more you resist its current without learning how to channel it, the more misaligned and incoherent you become. But once you release the need for total control, you can begin to play with life’s tensions—to work within them. That’s where beauty and meaning begin to emerge. But without that surrender, the pain of uncertainty becomes unbearable. You try to outthink life rather than live it. And for the psychologically fragile, that unpredictability doesn’t provoke curiosity—it triggers survival mode. Defensive thinking. Effortful control. A compulsive need to eradicate ambiguity.

That’s not a strength. It’s resistance. It’s the refusal of coherence. And ultimately, it’s the blueprint of disorder.

In closing, I wasn’t about to “deconstruct” and leave you with a vacuum. Here is how I think we correct course—at least, partially.

The correction doesn’t come from rejecting structure, nor from blindly submitting to it, but from learning how to engage with it as a partner in development. It means reclaiming participation as a virtue: choosing to step into responsibility, to attune to what life demands rather than only what it permits. This requires cultivating internal discipline—not the punitive kind, but the kind born of commitment, repetition, and exposure to the very ambiguities we’re tempted to avoid. It means rebuilding trust in reality, not as something to conquer or evade, but something to metabolize and collaborate with. It means seeking out relationships, institutions, and commitments not because they offer comfort or affirmation, but because they anchor us to something beyond our whims. We don’t need to return to the past wholesale, but we do need to remember that freedom is not the absence of constraint. It’s the capacity to act meaningfully within limits.

We’ve come to treat maturity—discipline, accountability, surrender to structure, as if it were oppression. But it isn’t. It’s the threshold of coherence.

We are not meant to be sovereign islands, nor passive recipients of order, but conscious participants in the unfolding of life. The antidote to chaos is not domination, but disciplined engagement. It is not total freedom, but freedom rightly bound.

1. Postmodernism is a philosophical and cultural movement that emerged in the mid-to-late 20th century, primarily in response to the perceived failures of Enlightenment rationalism and modernist ideals. It is characterized by skepticism toward universal truths, distrust of grand narratives, and the deconstruction of established power structures, language, and meaning (Lyotard, 1979; Derrida, 1976; Foucault, 1977). In this context, “unraveling” refers to the downstream effects of these ideas as they migrated from academic discourse into broader cultural consciousness—particularly through the humanities, education, and media. While postmodernism succeeded in exposing many genuine social and institutional flaws, it also contributed to a breakdown of shared meaning, moral coherence, and institutional trust. Psychologically, this unraveling has contributed to a fragmented sense of self, rising identity instability, and increased moral relativism (Baumeister, 1991; Cushman, 1990).

2. The Aristotelian virtues refer to character traits developed through reason and habituation that support human flourishing (eudaimonia), as described in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. These include temperance, courage, prudence (practical wisdom), and justice—all of which aim to help individuals live in balance with themselves, others, and the polis (community).

3. The phrase draws from cybernetics, a scientific field pioneered by Norbert Wiener (1948) that studies self-regulating systems through feedback loops. In biological and psychological systems, this concept underpins how organisms adapt to stressors, maintain homeostasis, and learn from feedback. In developmental and clinical psychology, similar concepts appear in resilience theory and systems theory, which describe individuals as open systems that evolve through exposure to tension and challenge.

4. Locus of control is a psychological construct introduced by Julian Rotter (1966) that refers to an individual’s belief about what governs outcomes in their life. A person with an external locus of control attributes success or failure to forces outside themselves—luck, other people, systemic oppression—while someone with an internal locus feels responsible for their own actions and consequences. A sustained external locus is associated with higher anxiety, lower self-efficacy, and blame-shifting behaviors (Twenge et al., 2004; Lefcourt, 1982).

5. While overall religious affiliation in the U.S. has declined, there is a growing subcurrent—especially among disillusioned younger people—seeking structure, ritual, and moral grounding. This movement is partly a reaction to the cultural vacuum left by the decline of traditional meaning systems (Pew Research Center, 2021; Smith & Denton, 2005).

Psychologically, religion and ritual have been shown to support mental health, moral development, and social cohesion, particularly by reducing uncertainty and reinforcing collective identity (Vail et al., 2010; Norton & Gino, 2014).