Descriptions of unmanageability in AA are often very sloppy. The word is ill-defined. People will often describe really anything unpleasant as unmanageability. Disagreeable emotions, unpleasant conditions, character defects, immaturity, incompetence, disorganisation, even the deliberate manufacture of circumstances (e.g. arranging one's schedule in such a way as one will inevitably be late). All of these might have touches of unmanageability, but they do not speak to its core.
What is its core?
It is the result of actions that are automatic and involuntary, and remain so even when they come to our awareness. If I lack power, what I should have power over will not be manageable by me. I cannot manage it because I have no power to manage it.
If I have no strength to lift the chair, the chair is unliftable.
If I have no power to turn the steering wheel, the car is un-steerable.
If I have no authority to manage my staff, my staff is unmanageable.
If I have no power to control my actions, that which my actions should control, namely my life, is unmanageable.
From Webster's 1913 dictionary:
Manage: To have under control and direction; to conduct; to guide; to administer ....
Unmanageable therefore describes the condition of not being under my control, not being under my direction, not being susceptible to my desire to control, guide, and administer it.
Now, the results of this failure may be deleterious, but that is beside the point. If the steering wheel locks, the car might presently crash into something or might not; whether this happens now depends on the shape of the road and the other traffic; but the car is un-steerable either way.
Unmanageability is about the inability to exert will to control, direct, conduct, guide, and administer my life.
If I exert my will to do such, but the results are poor, my life is not unmanageable; I am incompetent, or external factors have confounded my efforts.
If I do not exert my will do to such, because I cannot, because my addiction (or anonism) is dictating that my efforts be exerted elsewhere (in other words I'm busy drinking or preoccupied with others), my life might be good or bad in result, but either way my life is unmanageable:
I am the absentee landlord. I am the boss off sick. I am the power station disconnected from the grid. I'm the impotent man; the decaffeinated coffee; the hollow threat; the blunt knife; the dry fountain pen; the blank shot; the reed-less clarinet; the bow-less violin; the unfuelled car; the paralysed limb.
To sum up, unmanageability is not about specific consequences I happen not to approve of: it is about the disconnection between me and my life. It's now running on its own track, and I merely look on, powerless to do anything about it.