I was listening to a podcast this week, and the host asked a great question—one of those that sticks in your head and rattles around for a while. I’ll paraphrase it:
“What’s the thing you’ve changed your mind about the most in the past five years?”
Five years ago, I was much more of the “things are down to individual choices” camp. Now, I’m leaning hard toward “there is no free will.”
I was talking about this with someone at a coworking space (well, a guy sitting next to me at x+why in MK, who happened to be within bothering distance). We found ourselves talking about free will, and I said, “It definitely feels like we have free will, but I’m not sure we do.”
He disagreed. He was sure we all have free will.
Then I looked at us both and realised something. If we have free will, how come we don’t know each other but we’re basically dressed the same?
All I know is: There may be no free will. But it feels like there is.
Patterns, Not Choices
What got us talking about this was the “What have you done in the last five days?” thing that Elon did this week—which, when you break it down, assumes that you actually choose the things you do. But did you?
Most of what we do seems to be momentum, routine, and circumstance disguised as decision-making. We like to believe we’re in control, but half the time, we’re just following paths already laid out for us.
And honestly? The more I learn, the less I feel like I know. For reasons which take too long to explain, I was fact-checking some of the ‘stories’ we tell ourselves about tradition and history and to state the somewhat obvious these change over time. For example, “who ‘discovered’ the USA” was a simple thing taught to me at primary school (in the year 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue) but – ignoring the fact there were people already there - Christopher Columbus didn’t just fail to be the first European to discover the US—he didn’t even land on mainland US soil (spoiler, it was probably the Vikings (sub spoiler, Viking is an activity not a people), and CC only made it to The Bahamas). Yet, I somehow spent most of my life thinking otherwise.
If I was wrong about that, what else am I wrong about? What else do we absorb without questioning?
That brings me to the realisation that if free will is barely a thing, maybe we should be a bit slower to judge.
Maybe what looks like a “bad decision” was never really a decision at all. Maybe what seems like a person “not trying hard enough” is just someone stuck in a system they didn’t build, with options they didn’t pick, shaped by experiences they didn’t control.
So yeah. Don’t judge the insides by the outsides.
Because if we can’t even choose not to dress exactly like the stranger sitting next to us, how much control do we really have?
I’m off to have a ruddy good lie down now because my brain hurts.
Peace, love, and happy toastie day
MP