I enjoy asking the deep questions. The thought-provoking rough nuggets that philosophers have labored to polish for centuries. In asking these questions, I don’t presume that I’ll ever arrive at an answer. My goal is to feel out the shape of the quandary, understand its mood, describe in part the shadow it casts, and through the process, grow.

Today’s topic? Free Will vs. Fate.

I will begin my searching in this arena with a bold statement. Humans have absolute free will. We can do anything we want, anything we set our minds to. Anything. When I get up in the morning, I can choose to go to work, or I can choose to stay home. I can choose to get into my car and drive to the ocean. Drive into the ocean. Walk all the way from my house to the ocean. Hop on one leg from my bed and eventually be swallowed up by the salty embrace of the ocean.

Why not? What’s stopping me?

Exactly. I have free will.

Ah… but it’s never really that easy, is it.

Even though I can do anything I want, not everything comes with the same cost. With my hopping, for instance, my leg could give out at any moment after I reach my physical limits. Or I could be arrested for trespassing across a freeway, become that crazy man on the news who thought he could hop to the ocean.

That is where our friend Fate comes in. Fate is the seductress we blame when there is only one true road, only one easy path to trod. When I say, “It was Fate!”, what I really mean is I either hit a barrier I could not cross, or I took the easiest and most logical of my infinite number of choices. I blame the elusive mistress Fate to explain away my shortcomings or lean on her to confirm my wanting biases.

I’m not alone in deciding this, Fate made me!

Stepping back a bit from our scapegoat Fate, let us take a moment to consider the largest barriers of free will. For the sake of brevity, the love of small prime numbers, and a dark desire to be a badly rhyming fool, I have boiled them down to three.

Biological.

Temporal.

Cultural.

The mind is strong, the body is weak

While I may want to do anything, my first stumbling block is one we’ve already mentioned. Basic biology. I am only so tall, only so strong. I inhibit this corporeal body with this nose and these wrinkle lines and all of its basic needs. I may yearn to lay around and never work again, but then food and shelter would become an issue. I may want to sink down into that deep and dark ocean, but then my need for oxygen would severely limit my explorations.

Can’t go on exploring if I be dead.

Here comes my second bold statement. We, humanity, can solve any problem before us. Strength can be augmented with machines. Darkness attacked with light. The ocean delved with submarines. We humans have gone to the moon and back, have microscopes and colliders that witness the very elementary particles of existence. So, while biology’s limits are strong, we can overcome them.

Say that again, how long will that take?

Yes… I am still willfully being a bit naïve. Not every biological problem is so easily solved. Some things take time. A lot of time. Let’s ask our pal Leonardo Di Vincci. He created a helicopter but knew, temporally, he was born in the wrong era to see it come to life. Material science would have to catch up to his ideas. And it did. But it took a long time.

So long… he be dead before he saw it.

Oh death! Curse you!

Beyond the need for advancement, time is also a contributing factor to any financial goals. It’s never a question of how much, but how much by when. A million dollars tomorrow is much more powerful than a million dollars after working for forty years. We don’t just want more money. We want more money than our peers in the same amount of time.

A dollar is a very powerful thing if everyone else only has a nickel.

Sidenote… our absolute free will is my cornerstone reasoning as to why men dream of immortality. In our hearts there is a yearning to do… accomplish… build. Yet eventually we all die. We want to live in the boundless fields of our free will, yet our bodies and time itself betray us.

Ah, but wouldn’t you know, there is a workaround solution to this problem as well!

The wisdom… or folly… of the crowd

Where one man or woman’s life can only account for so much in the time given, when we add all those little lives together we can collectively achieve greatness in the blink of an eye. This is a truth hardcoded in our bones. We are a species that leans towards community and connection. We form governments, give up a portion of our individual power and gift it to the whole. We create movements, align our interests with others like magnetic fields, forcing things to go in the direction of our unified push or pull. We build pyramids (literally and figuratively), gifting our adoration and power to those we place on top, lifting up the few to be our heroes.

Our champions.

There is great wisdom in crowds. One well known example is the great “guess the weight” game of an ox at your local county fair. While each individual’s guess can, and will be wrong, when put together into a pool of guesses, the crowd’s average comes out surprisingly close.

On the darker side, there is a great stupidity in the crowd as well. A misalignment of thousands, of millions is hard to fix, nearly impossible to redirect. One man or woman’s pain can poison everyone if they are the ones in charge. Remember my first bold statement? There are no rules in life. We can do anything. What happens if we convince enough other people to go along with our hairbrained schemes?

Well… then we all go swimming in the ocean together.

What is right, what is wrong?

The chains of culture and history are where I will end my thoughts for today. I have absolute free will. While time and physical limits bind, I feel it is the collective will of those around me that limit me the most. What have others before me done? How have they succeeded, and how must I follow the path they’ve already set? The yoke of relationships. What do others expect me to do? What responsibilities are on my shoulders for the betterment of others, or for the betterment of myself?

My last bold statement? No one truly knows the best way to live life. We’re all guessing.

I go to work to earn money because I need food. I could earn money through a great variety of jobs but I choose to continue in my current profession because other humans value my productivity most in this way. I’ve built a reputation at being effective in this role and am rewarded for that reputation, experience, and skill.

Boiled down to the roots, that is all my salary is. Other’s numerical consideration of my value to the greater community.

However, what I want you to consider is the fact that… employment… as we know it, isn’t the only we as a species could decide to allocate resources. There are other systems. Expanding this thought, what about family structures? The calendar? The names of things? Or a simple one… government. We, as a collective, could decide tomorrow that some other system would be better. We have in the past and even argue amongst ourselves now. Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, Feudalism, Monarchy, Theocracy, Hunter Gatherers, and on and on. The walls and limits of today’s culture aren’t set in stone.

The trickiest part is what I’ve stated above, knowing anything for sure. What was and is may not be best. What’s new may not be better either. We can try anything. But not everything at once. You let the ocean swallow you up? You’ll miss the mountains. Is that a problem? It might be. It might not be.

What do I know? 

And if all else fails, Fate made me do it!

I’m only here… slowly polishing the same rough nugget of thought that no one else in the history of humanity has fully answered.

Eh… I’ll keep polishing away.