The Uncontrollability of Puppies

Or, how to resonate with reality

This past June, my wife and I adopted a golden retriever puppy named Sylvie. This was a landmark day for us. I grew up with dogs around, but Jenny had never had one. Nor was she particularly interested in dogs of any sort when we met.

It took me nearly eight years of begging—and pointing out every majestic golden retriever we passed in the streets—before she acquiesced to my pleas to adopt one, with the crucial stipulation that I take full responsibility for walking, training, grooming, and picking up after her. I agreed enthusiastically, of course, so we had ourselves a deal, and a puppy.

Sylvie, confused about leashes

Now, I am not proud of this, but we lasted exactly one week before returning Sylvie to the farm she came from.

We had done our homework and understood as best we could what the “puppy stage” would be like—constant supervision during the day, letting her out three times each night, all the usual trainings and “accidents” along the way—but I now realize that no amount of head-knowledge can substitute for the frenzied experience of an eight-week-old puppy actually let loose in one’s living room.

Six days in, starved for sleep and peace and quiet, we agreed to bring Sylvie back once her breeders confirmed another family was available to adopt her.

I tried to persuade Jenny that things would get easier, that this was just a stage, but she was now even more sure of her long-held conviction that she was not a dog person. In any event, I was so exhausted after what felt like weeks of nonstop dog-sitting that I didn’t bother pressing my case. The next day we drove 90 minutes and returned Sylvie to her farm.

She slept the whole car ride

Taming the World

I realize people give up pets for various reasons all the time, but something about this experience bothered me—as if returning Sylvie was a kind of moral judgment error. More recently, I’ve been reflecting on it all through the lens of a provocative little book called The Uncontrollability of the World, by German sociologist Hartmut Rosa.¹ If you haven’t read it (you should) here’s the gist:

Rosa argues that the chief characteristic of modern life is a desire to control the world. Controlling the world means rendering it visible, accessible, manageable, and useful to human purposes. All of the major projects of modernity—from the scientific and industrial revolutions to the Enlightenment and our own digital age—have sought to bring more of the world within human reach and control, according to Rosa.

For examples, he points to everything from music streaming services like Spotify, which bring the entire “world” of recorded music to our fingertips and earbuds, to modern airfare, which opens the literal world to us, whether in the form of pre-determined vacation destinations, quick business trips, or a near-limitless range of possible new cities to call home.

Amazon Prime’s free 2-day shipping is an example of controlling the world, as are traffic lights, weather.com, government militaries, luxury cruises, and the TikTok algorithm, engineered to serve up “optimized” video content with an ever-increasing degree of specificity (and creepiness). In each case, Rosa suggests modernity has conditioned us to see the world “as something to be known, exploited, attained, appropriated, mastered, and controlled” (14).

When Reality Falls Mute

So modernity wants to control the world. So good so far. The second major premise of the book, however, is that a controlled world becomes a dull world, at least beyond a certain point. Rosa believes that attempting to master reality actually closes us off from its deepest wonders, when its “axes of resonance” fall mute and we feel increasingly alienated, lost, or merely bored in the world. (Read: mindlessly doom scrolling through Twitter when you have all the information in the world at your fingertips.)

The book’s argument gets increasingly sophisticated from here, and we need to get back to Sylvie, so let’s fast forward a bit.

If attempting to control the world alienates us from it, might we naturally conclude that embracing uncontrollability is the path back to a resonant relationship with reality? Not exactly. Rosa rightly notes that pure uncontrollability—or absolute unpredictability—would lead to chaos. What he proposes instead is something in between: “semicontrollability.”

Semicontrollability

As you might expect, semicontrollability entails a balance between what we can and cannot control, a kind of yin-yang relationship between chaos and order. To be sure, we all need some degree of regularity and control to act with confidence in the world; the key to experiencing resonance, according to Rosa, is to acknowledge the things that we cannot (or should not attempt to) control. He writes:

“Resonance requires giving up control over both what we encounter and the process of encountering it, and at the same time being able—and trusting in our ability—to reach out to this other side [of the world] and establish responsive contact with it” (57).

To my delight, one example of “semicontrollability” that Rosa offers is the game of soccer. Why do fans and athletes alike find such deep delight (i.e. resonance) in the sport if not for its dimensions of uncontrollability? Or rather, its semicontrollability. The rules and boundaries of the game are set, but nothing else—not the weather, not the health of the players, not the thousands of contingent movements throughout the match that result in a final score.

The same could be said for activities like hunting or fishing, at least when thought of as sport: part of the thrill of waiting beside your cast fishing line is precisely not knowing what you could catch that day, if anything at all. Thus even a bad day of fishing beats a good day at the office, as the saying goes.

Furthermore, I suspect semicontrollability helps explain the basic human desire to be “in nature” more generally, as opposed to highly engineered manmade environments. I may come upon a bright orange fox while walking through the woods, or I may see nothing but blackbirds—and that’s part of the lure of exposing ourselves to the natural world, which we cannot exhaustively predict or control. For Rosa, that quality of uncontrollability is exactly what opens us to the possibility of a resonant encounter with reality.

The Semicontrollability of Sylvie

Domestic pets are an interesting example of semicontrollability. Obviously, good owners want to train and condition their pets, which we might think of in terms of exercising control over the animal’s instincts. Growing up, the instant my dad whistled for Sammy, our family golden retriever, he’d come running (unless Sammy was already chasing a cat, at which point his baser animal instincts had totally taken over).

We want our pets to be somewhat predictable, and they need us to be predictable, too. However, even the most domesticated pets cannot be entirely controlled, meaning our relations with them always and necessarily fall within the realm of semicontrollability. Some evenings, our house cat Morris decides to lay on my wife’s lap while we read, as she’s trained him to do; other evenings he goes for the ottoman in the foyer.

Puppies, on the other hand, are closer to pure uncontrollability. They have yet not learned to heed your commands, or ask to be let outside, or sleep through the night, or refrain from chewing valuable things. And so, living with them can feel precarious, hazardous, and exhausting. In other words, resonance requires training. I know that if we would have stuck with Sylvie for another week or two, things would have gotten much better. The chaos just caught us off guard.

Finally, here it’s crucial to mention that Rosa conceives of resonance as a “mode of relation,” not just an element of surprise. To experience resonance with some aspect of reality, we must enter into a kind of relationship with it, adapting, listening, and responding to its concrete singularity. Any pet owner can back this point, because it is the resonance of one’s semi-controllable relationship with a dog or a cat or a rabbit that ultimately makes pet ownership worthwhile. And this, I now realize, is the very thing Jenny and I gave up when we returned Sylvie—a chance to experience resonance with one particularly adorable dimension of reality.

… 😭

Of course, we can all begin to identify other spheres of semicontrollability in our lives, not the least of which are the relationships we enjoy with other humans: spouses, friends, colleagues, even strangers. If Rosa is right, we will resonate with others only when we first acknowledge them as uniquely other, as distinctive, individuated human persons worthy of our attention and respect. Only then will we be prepared to see reality for what it truly is—not a thing to be mastered or feared—but a gift.

1. Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World. Translated by James C. Wagner. Medford, MA: Polity Press. 2021.