(1) There are thing you can control and things you cannot. (The exact nature of those groups is beyond the purview of this essay.)
(2) For those things you control, you have three basic choices: better, worse, or the same.
(3) Better is clearly the best of those three options.

I think saying it that way should clear up your second point. While I could (would) disagree with you about all three of those things not being under your control, if they are indeed not controllable they’re outside of that point.

If you’re saying that by not working on something I can control, how am I leaving it up to someone else? That’s a finer point, and I wrote that sentence incarefully. The implicit argument is that if you’re choosing not to control the things you can, the only way they’ll change is that someone else makes you change them. It’s a bit of an inexact point though, I’d allow, but I do think it’s basically valid.

To the extent that it’s true that some negative-seeming character traits are instrumental in your life, I’d liken it to using a flat-headed screwdriver to get unscrew a Phillips-headed screw. It may work, and it looks a little like it’s being done right, but it’s still not really the best way to do the job. Status anxiety may help you to focus more, but because your vision is always clouded with it you’re not able to act as wisely as someone without that issue. (When you’re caught by status anxiety you’re frequently asking “what is the best-appearing way to handle this situation?”, rather than just “what’s the best way to handle this?”)

You can continue to work to be better when you aren’t constantly worrying about how you’re doing. And you’ll also be free from all the worrying. Anxiety isn’t the easiest thing in the world to improve, but I do believe it’s both possible and worthwhile to work on. And you can do so while still work on sucking less in other areas.

Glad to see you write about this. I’d like to respond to this but I’m afraid I am not really following the logic. I’m looking for a main point or two that I can grab onto, but I’m not really seeing one.

Without a main point, I’m left making some semi-related side comments like these:

Determining what’s “best” or “better” is really messy, isn’t it? For example, on my private blog we’re currently discussing whether my anxiety/insecurity might actually be helping me to be “good” at some things because feeling that I suck might make me concentrate an unusual amount of mental energy on sucking less. If true, then how much of those anxious/insecure thoughts do you “allow in,” assuming you have control?

I’m not seeing how this dichotomy makes sense: “who do you want to control your life: yourself or interested strangers?” If I don’t control my happiness or my jump-shooting ability or my intelligence then it follows that other people do?

The chaos theory bit is taken, but I think your point about how little it can be predicted is precisely my point. Is it conceivable that the untimely death a single bureaucrat could change the lives of millions of Latin Americans whose trade deal no longer has some unreasonably obstinate and powerful man blocking it? Yes. Is anyone calling for revolutions against disproportionately powerful bureaucrats struck within some monolithic system whose prevailing attitude on a topic has changed but for that one odd hold-out? Not at all. (At least as I phrased that, it strengthens the point about how much they’d actually be benefitting from broad slow changes in opinion than quick, sharp revolutionaries.)

To your final point, this is my campaign. My long slow quest that will probably take longer to achieve than I’ll live. There is no revolution I can perpetrate that will make the world realize that the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man, that how you relate the world has a much stronger effect on your opinion of it than the world you inhabit, etc. I’m writing pieces like this not for the revolutionary moment when 100,000 people read it and see this single point is right and join the forces of sanity, but to help people already some distance down the road to carry on, to know that they’re on the right track, and that this twilight struggle toward enlightenment is still worth the effort. (Which is to say nothing for its value as simple rhetorical practice. Nor of the somewhat absurd grandiosity of that sentence.)

Wait, so are you insinuating that hanging out in a crowd of fellow unsatisfied passive-aggressive people in downtown Manhattan is not going to lead to a narrowing of the income gap, a cleansing of corrupt financial institutions, or just generally a better government or a better life, even if we hold up really clever signs?

I agree, of course. But I will add attempt to add a subtle layer.

Reality may be too complicated to plan and then execute a revolution, but that is not the same as saying that reality is too complicated for revolutions. If a butterfly flapping its wings in Asia can cause gale-force winds in Colorado, or something, then so could cutting off the head of a metaphorical snake theoretically cause a change in the way day-to-day life is conducted in certain places.

The problem, it seems to me, is that we think we are smarter than we really are. We think we can predict which snake head should be decapitated at which time in order to cause the change we desire, without of course any of those damned unintended consequences.

But to ask people to perceive reality as complicated, where we don’t in fact have full control over our fate, where villains and heroes occupy not only the same institutions but the same bodies, where “good” and “bad” are a bit squishier than we are comfortable admitting, is kind of asking a lot, isn’t it? In other words, why should we ask people to be “realistic” about their potential for causing revolutionary change when asking them to do so is asking them to confront something a bit more troubling than their capacity for revolutions? Look at you, David, you’re out here asking us to be realistic but you’re bumping up against our fundamental unrealism. I don’t know whether to call it a “need” or “unrelenting desire” or “evolved psychological survival mechanism” or whatever but there’s one thing I do know: Whatever the hell it is, I’ve got it and I’m pretty sure you’ve got it – it just may not show up until we step away from our keyboards.

You mean PROCEEDED.