The Cost of Control
On trust, collaboration, and the courage to let go.
Everywhere I look, something that once felt united is splintering. Governments can’t agree on what’s true. Communities can’t agree on what’s good. Even the spaces built on cooperation—the rehearsal rooms, the group chats, the dinner tables—feel both heavier and more delicate than ever.
There’s a lot of talk about working together, but no one seems to know how to get there.
On paper, collaboration sounds noble. It’s the word we use when we want to signal openness. It looks great in a mission statement. It sounds beautiful in a press interview. But in practice, it typically doesn’t look like hand-holding or harmony.
It’s riddled with discomfort; a slow undoing of certainty.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately—what it costs to make something together. Not just the effort or the hours, but the psychic tax of letting go of our personal ideas in service of something larger.
Because the truth is—surrender doesn’t come naturally. We grip. We plan. We protect the small pieces that make us feel safe: our ideas, our beliefs, our roles, our rightness. Even when those same defenses keep us from seeing the full picture.
That’s what I want to explore this week. Why it’s so hard to loosen our hold on control and why collaboration, in art and in life, so often asks us to release something we love in order to build something we can’t yet see.
Let’s get into it.
The Illusion of Control
Control is such a quaint word for what it really is. It can look like care, or precision, or love for the work. But underneath, it’s usually fear. A fear of being perceived as “bad.”
A fear of watching something change after you’ve poured your heart into it. A fear that if you let someone else touch it, they’ll ruin what made it special in the first place.
I know that fear. The small tightening in the chest when the world feels unpredictable.
The voice that whispers, don’t let go. There’s something deeply human about that. We want to feel useful, seen, heard. We want to believe we’re steering the ship.
And it makes sense. When things feel uncertain, the brain craves order. Clarity. Calm. It’s the most basic kind of coping mechanism—a way of soothing the nervous system when things feel out of our control. It’s the same reflex that makes us press the elevator button again even though it’s already lit. We know it won’t make a difference, but for a second, it calms the chaos inside us.
Control tricks the body into thinking it’s safe. It gives our anxiety something to hold. But safety built on control is fragile—it depends on everything going exactly to plan, and life rarely does.
So we grip. Harder. Tighter. Because uncertainty feels unbearable. Because admitting we might be wrong feels like a small death. There’s real grief in surrender—in watching a belief or a version of yourself dissolve.
So we build small fortresses. We systemize, polish, dictate, defend. We mistake the grip of control for the embrace of care. And for a moment, it works. We feel strong. Certain. Safe.
Until we don’t.
What We Lose When We Grip
At first, it’s quiet. A pause before someone speaks. The hesitation before an idea gets shared. The room still seems like it’s singing, but the harmony is gone.
When collaboration turns into control, hearts harden. Creativity curdles. Micromanagement turns into fear. Curiosity is met with defensiveness. Every choice suddenly needs permission, and the room starts to tip toe with caution instead of pulsing with imagination.
It’s debilitating. Devastating even. The spark dims, and the space that was supposed to be safe turns into a prison. We feel trapped. Breathless.
And that same reflex that kills collaboration? It also kills community. We start mistaking consensus for connection. When what actually holds a system together is a combination of trust and surrender—the willingness to release and believe.
When we loosen, even a little, something else has space to arrive: collective effervescence. That electric sense of unity that happens when individuals surrender into a shared rhythm. You can feel it when a scene clicks, or a crowd sings, or a conversation finally breaks open. For a brief moment, everyone in the room is breathing the same air, and something larger than any one person takes over.
We can’t access that space while we’re trying to manage it. Control keeps us outside the current. To step into it, we have to risk being changed.
And that’s the real cost of gripping too tight: the loss of transformation.
The small miracle of being altered by each other.
Collaboration as Surrender
Surrender gets a bad rap because it sounds like losing. In a creative room, it’s closer to releasing. You don’t disappear—you just stop muscling the moment and let the work show you what it wants.
When it’s happening, you can feel it in the body first. The shoulders drop. The jaw unclenches. The air shifts. The conversation slows down just enough for something unexpected to slip in.
It’s subtle, but it changes everything. People stop pitching to win. Notes land as possibilities instead of verdicts. The attention slides from me to the thing we’re making.
And then, once in a while, the thing suddenly clicks. The joke lands cleaner than you planned. The scene breathes easier. The music finds a groove you didn’t know it had. No one can claim credit for it, but everyone knows they were part of it.
That’s what surrender does. It trades ownership for belonging. It turns effort into exchange.
And maybe the rehearsal room is just a rehearsal for everything else. The same muscle that helps us listen in a creative process helps us listen in life—to a family member mid-argument, to a friend with a different view, to a community trying to build something fairer than what came before.
It’s the practice of staying open when closing off would be easier. The art of letting a moment, or another person, teach you something new.
Surrender isn’t giving up. It’s giving in—to the current, to each other, to the possibility that what emerges might be better than what any of us could’ve imagined alone.
One last thing…
I didn’t know what this week’s Fourth Wall was going to be about. I had a dozen half-starts in my notes app: one about burnout, one about my voice, one just titled “???” (a personal favorite). None of them clicked.
I kept trying to force it—to write something profound, something with a point. But the harder I pushed, the worse it got.
It wasn’t until I stopped trying to make it work that I realized the thing I’d been circling all week was the very thing I was resisting.
Surrender.
This process of remounting Beau has stretched me in ways I didn’t expect. The show that started as something tiny has now ballooned into a small army of humans, each with their own opinions, instincts, and snack preferences. It’s equal parts thrilling and terrifying to realize it’s officially grown beyond what I could’ve imagined or predicted.
That’s what collaboration does. It grows up. It changes. It helps us see beyond our own imagination. What a fucking thrill.
But that joy, pride, wonder, and awe can only come as much as I’m willing to surrender my own ego. I have to let it be about more than me in order for it to grow beyond me.
And this piece needed the same thing. When I stopped gripping the writing, the plan, the outcome—the thread appeared.
Once again, it didn’t come from control. It came from listening. From letting the week speak for itself. From surrendering, again, to what’s already here.
So if you’re in the middle of your own version of this—trying to hold it all together, to make it perfect, to keep it from falling apart—maybe take a breath. Loosen the jaw. Let go of the plan.
And maybe try trusting that the thing you’re working on is also working on you.
See you next week ♥️
—Matt