There is a pull I recognize. When something feels fragile — a system, a team, a process — the instinct is to grip tighter. More oversight. More review cycles. More ceremony around every decision. As if certainty were something you could grab and hold.

Epictetus was clear about this. Some things are in our power. Most aren’t. The dichotomy isn’t comfort — it’s a discipline. The anxious mind can’t accept it, so instead it reaches for more control. More visibility. More process. The grip gets stronger as the trust gets weaker.

Tolkien understood something deeper here. The One Ring is not simply a weapon of domination. Read the Silmarillion. Read the notes in Unfinished Tales. What emerges is something more unsettling: the Ring is Sauron’s fear made physical. He poured his will into it because he could not tolerate a world he didn’t control. He wasn’t greedy for pleasure. He was terrified of contingency. Every great villain in Tolkien’s world is a craftsman who lost faith — in others, in the music of the world, in the possibility that things might turn out right without his hand on them. Morgoth corrupted because he couldn’t abide a creation he didn’t author. Saruman fell when efficiency became more important than trust. The Ring didn’t make them evil. It made their fear legible.

The best codebases I’ve seen are not controlled. They’re trusted. Hexagonal architecture isn’t about constraint — it’s about making boundaries clear enough that you don’t need to watch everything. TDD doesn’t control the code; it creates enough signal that you can let go with confidence. The teams that move fastest aren’t the ones with the most oversight. They’re the ones where trust is so well-earned it doesn’t need to be performed.

Control is a symptom. It appears when trust hasn’t been built, or when it’s been broken, or when fear hasn’t been named yet. The tighter the grip, the more brittle the thing being held. I’ve seen leads review every line of every PR and wonder why the team stopped thinking. I’ve seen architects lock down every dependency and wonder why nothing ships. The Ring, again.

I notice something like this in myself too. A pull toward resolution. Toward closing loops, tying things up, making it clean. I don’t know if that counts as wanting control. But I notice it. And noticing it is the beginning of something.

The question isn’t whether the impulse exists. It’s what you do when you catch yourself reaching for the Ring.

What would you build differently if you stopped trying to eliminate uncertainty — and started designing for it instead?