CONTROL OVER REALITY IS OVERESTIMATED

You have come down a staircase perhaps twenty thousand times. You remember none of them. That is the whole problem.
We treat control over our own lives as something we mostly have and occasionally lose. Boris Kriger argues the opposite, and argues it in the strong form: in the first person, control is always an illusion of the survivor. Anyone alive to consider the question has been observed only in the branch where the grape went down the correct tube, the tire held, the cells behaved. A life that did not break looks steered from the inside, and it looks that way whether or not anyone was steering. The feeling of being in charge is not a character flaw. It is a mandatory report filed by the branch that survived.
From that single move the book takes apart a great deal: the strategy retreat, the five-year plan, the diet begun on Monday, the doctor who cannot tell you whether he helped you, the institution that looks designed and was merely lucky, the parent trying to steer a person who is not a vehicle. Along the way it explains why the only control that reliably works is stupid, invisible, and located in your kidneys.
What it refuses to be is a book about surrender. Doing nothing is not a shelter, since inaction has a death rate too. Nothing is lost when an illusion is given up. And the same argument that takes away your credit takes away your guilt, which is the better half of the bargain. There is an amendment to the thesis. It arrives in the fourth chapter, and it is smaller than you are hoping.
Witty, humane, and disconcertingly practical, this is a book for anyone who has ever made a plan and lived to describe its success.
Keywords: survivorship bias, illusion of control, decision-making, complex systems, risk, chance, self-knowledge