Life & Wisdom Quote by Darren L. Johnson

The quiet sting here is the gap between knowing and living. Johnson isn’t arguing that people are ignorant of control; he’s arguing that they’re performatively forgetful. We can list what’s in our hands and what isn’t, yet we behave as if sheer attention were a form of leverage. That’s the psychological tell: rumination dressed up as responsibility.

The line “we live as though we do not really know” works because it frames self-sabotage as a kind of daily theater. We act out competence by obsessing over outcomes, other people’s choices, timing, luck, the past. It’s not just wasted effort; it’s a way to avoid the scarier work of agency. Focusing on the uncontrollable can feel productive without requiring risk, change, or accountability. If the obstacle is the world, you never have to find out what happens when you actually commit to what you can do.

“Spend years” widens the lens from a bad week to a life pattern. Johnson is pointing to the slow bleed: careers shaped by chasing external validation, relationships spent trying to manage someone else’s emotions, politics consumed as personal doomscrolling. The subtext is moral as much as practical: misplacing control isn’t merely inefficient, it erodes dignity. You become a citizen of your own life who keeps filing petitions to the wrong department.

As a piece of self-help realism, the intent is corrective, not comforting. It pushes the reader toward a harsher clarity: control isn’t a philosophy, it’s a budget. Spend it where it buys something.