I love sitting inside a premium automobile because the dashboard permits me, briefly, to believe I have been entrusted with something more consequential than driving to Costco.
The displays glow. The gauges awaken. Climate control maintains the cabin at precisely seventy-one degrees. Cameras watch my blind spots. Radar measures the distance between me and surrounding vehicles. A satellite knows where I am even when I don’t. The center display resembles something Boeing might install in a modest interplanetary spacecraft.
I settle into the driver’s seat and survey my domain.
This is my Master Control Center.
For a few glorious moments, I am Captain Kirk.
Then the light turns green.
The woman in front of me doesn’t move because she is staring at her phone, presumably receiving information of greater importance than the traffic signal directly above her windshield. I wait. She continues texting. The man behind me cannot see her, so he concludes that I am the idiot and begins pounding his horn.
Now I am trapped between two strangers whose behavior I cannot control: one oblivious, the other enraged.
My Master Control Center has become a $40,000 waiting room.
So much for command.
The same fantasy takes hold when I sit at my computer. My silver Mac mini is an exquisite little machine, a futuristic square with rounded corners smaller than a paperback. It feeds two twenty-seven-inch 4K monitors. In front of them sits my six-pound aluminum mechanical keyboard, an instrument substantial enough to survive a direct artillery strike.
I lower myself into the chair.
Again, the feeling arrives.
Master Control Center.
Two enormous screens await my instructions. Chrome launches instantly. Documents synchronize across the cloud. I can access libraries, maps, financial accounts, newspapers, artificial intelligence, satellite photographs, and most of the accumulated knowledge of civilization without leaving my chair.
Then I decide to order a burrito from Chipotle.
The website wants me to create an account.
I enter a password.
Rejected.
Apparently, ordering carnitas now requires the cryptographic sophistication of a NATO intelligence officer. The password must contain at least twelve characters, one capital letter, one lowercase letter, three numbers, an obscure punctuation mark, the blood type of my maternal grandfather, and a hieroglyph unavailable on my keyboard. It cannot resemble any password I have used since 1987, contain an actual word, or be remembered by the human brain.
I try again.
Rejected.
I am sitting behind two 4K monitors with enough computing power to help design a suspension bridge, and I cannot obtain guacamole.
By now I’ve lost my appetite.
So much for control.
This recurring humiliation points to something I call the Master Control Delusion: the belief that sufficiently sophisticated equipment, information, planning, and preparation can place us at the controls of our lives.
Modern life encourages this fantasy because it gives us extraordinary control over trivial things. I can regulate the temperature inside my automobile to a single degree. I can synchronize a wristwatch to an atomic clock in Colorado. I can watch my retirement account fluctuate by the dollar. I can determine how many calories I burned on an exercise bike, how many grams of protein I consumed at lunch, and exactly how many minutes it will take me to drive to Costco.
All these measurements create the intoxicating sensation that someone is in charge.
Me.
Retirement may be the Master Control Delusion’s final examination.
You know retirement is coming, so you prepare. You fill out forms for months. You email HR so many times that the benefits coordinator becomes one of the most enduring relationships in adult life. You calculate pension income and net cash flow. You investigate Medicare. You take your omega-3s and magnesium. You exercise. You adhere to something vaguely resembling a Mediterranean diet. You consult financial advisers. You read books.
Eventually, you begin to feel that you have gotten your ducks in a row.
There they are.
The ducks.
Perfectly aligned.
Steve Lopez does his version of this in Independence Day. Trying to understand retirement before surrendering himself to it, he consults Nancy Schlossberg, the psychologist and author of Retire Smart, Retire Happy. If retirement has a Sherpa, Schlossberg qualifies. She has spent decades studying how people negotiate transitions, and she identifies several kinds of retirees.
Lopez recognizes himself as a Continuer. He doesn’t intend to stop using the abilities he spent a lifetime developing. He will carry his skills into retirement, remain engaged, and find new ways to be useful.
Excellent.
Another switch illuminated on the Master Control Center.
Lopez also establishes a more personal priority. Whatever else happens after retirement, he wants to remain close to his grown children.
This seems eminently reasonable.
Schlossberg does not reassure him.
She pauses.
Then she tells him, in effect, that even the plans occupying the top shelf of our lives remain vulnerable to circumstances we cannot anticipate. Retirement changes routines, relationships, assumptions, identities. Children move. Spouses change. Friends disappear. Bodies malfunction. People die. Other people unexpectedly enter our lives.
Schlossberg knows this not merely because she has studied retirement but because she has survived it.
She lost her husband. She could not have predicted that afterward she would develop a close relationship with another man. Then, five years later, that man died too. At ninety-one, after a lifetime studying human transitions, Schlossberg still cannot tell you what will happen next.
And during her conversation with Lopez, her phone rings.
It’s her latest boyfriend.
I love this detail.
The woman who has devoted her professional life to mapping transitions is herself living a life that refuses to stay on the map.
That is the Master Control Delusion demolished in a single telephone call.
The lesson isn’t that planning is foolish. Quite the opposite. Fill out the forms. Calculate the pension. Exercise. Eat the salmon. Maintain relationships. Decide where you want to live. Know what matters to you.
Build the finest Master Control Center you can.
Just don’t confuse the dashboard with the universe.
Retirement exposes that confusion because aging steadily enlarges the territory outside our command. You can manage risk but not abolish it. You can strengthen your body but not negotiate a permanent treaty with biology. You can love your children without determining where they will live. You can construct a meaningful life without controlling who remains in it.
This is difficult for people like me because preparation feels so much like control.
Give me a spreadsheet, two 4K monitors, a financial projection, a Mediterranean diet, and an ergonomically magnificent keyboard, and within fifteen minutes I begin to believe I have subdued contingency itself.
Then somebody dies.
Somebody falls in love.
Somebody moves away.
Somebody calls.
Or the woman in front of me doesn’t notice that the light has turned green.
The dashboard remains magnificent.
The future remains unimpressed.
Cinemorphosis 
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