As master of your own environment and means of living, you are required to exercise an active management of your own wants and needs. That means taking into account the relationships, environmental qualities, and behaviors of the greater system you are part of over a longer period of time. Neglect any of those parameters and you are essentially responsible for your own suffering, barring any extraneous events completely outside your control.
This is of course a limited way to understand control. Control is experienced differently in times of material abundance and scarcity, in times that are stable and unstable, and in varying degrees of approximation to the loci of control, the material and ideological levers of social power so to speak.
Perhaps a better way to speak of control is through the lens of participation. If one is allowed access to and modification of one's own means of living, and one has a selection of conscious choices to make as to how those means are carried out, one feels a sense of control, however illusory it is, because one is participating in the administration of one's own life.
What is important here is the area of awareness that is afforded through the means of control. If one has a large sphere through which to exercise control, one is aware of more elements within that sphere through necessity and repetition of contact. Similarly, the less in control of one's environment one is, the less cognizant one becomes of its elements. One becomes functionally self-interested and short-sighted.
This tendency has important consequences for the concentration of both economic and political power. If a growing amount of control is relegated to a shrinking class of political establishment or economic monopolist, then the rest of the population is denied participation and becomes apathetic to the maintenance of the political or economic sphere. There is great pleasure in successfully administrating one's life, so that the loss of this pleasure has to be reclaimed through other avenues, some productive, some intellectual, some creative, others hedonistic.
Needless to say, the loss of this large-scale participation results in fragmentation, causing all sorts of distortions which require all matter of contrivances to prevent a society from breaking down completely.
Life, if left to its own devices, knows how to attend to itself with itself. Kept from these devices, life seeks to attend to itself against itself, requiring evermore contrivance to at least simulate this harmony, delaying the inevitable dissolution.
