If you're reading this, you had no choice

Think about a tough decision you recently made. It could be anything. Maybe you had to decide what to get for your partner’s upcoming birthday. Or perhaps you were struggling to choose between a few schools you applied to. Or you might have had a tough time deciding whether to YOLO your entire life savings on GameStop stonks. Whatever the situation was, what if I told you that you had no control over the decision you made?

You’d probably say something like, “That statement doesn’t even make sense. I made the decision, so how could I have had no control over it? Of course I had control over what I decided to do.”

And you wouldn’t be wrong to say that. But it’d be equally valid to say that it wasn’t you but rather your circumstances that made the decision for you.

Consciousness

For a moment, think about the decisions that a pebble might make. Wait a second — a pebble doesn’t make decisions. People could toss it into a window, wind might blow it into the street, lightning may strike it and split it in half. But the pebble itself never decides to land in someone’s living room, to roll across the street, or to crumble to pieces on its own accord. Factors outside of its control like the environment around it make those decisions for the pebble. It’s an inanimate object whose fate is at the mercy of the world around it. It doesn’t have the luxury of free will.

And that’s the difference between a pebble and a person, you might say. A person has a brain; they have consciousness, while a pebble does not. If something lacks consciousness, it cannot make decisions for itself. That’s what most people would say. But the reality is that, in terms of free will, you are no different from a pebble.

Endless Possibilities

Let’s say that you were recently trying to figure out what to get your partner for their birthday. You had spent an entire week debating between two gifts: a pair of sneakers and a fancy jacket. But after long consideration, you realized that your partner already had so many jackets and that their shoes were getting worn out. That eliminated the jacket option, and you were left with just the sneakers option, making it your final decision.

What were all your options in that situation? You might say that you had two: the sneakers and the jacket. But you could have gone back further — for a brief moment, maybe you were considering buying your partner a new phone before quickly realizing that it was out of your budget. Well, including the phone, you might say that you actually had three options. But you could have gone back even further. At one point, before considering what your partner already owned, what your budget was like, and any other factors at all, every gift was a possibility. You had an infinite number of options at the very beginning, but all of them, aside from a single one, got eliminated for one reason or another. The only difference between the jacket, the phone, and all those other options was how much time it took you to eliminate them after you began considering your various circumstances.

In each and every decision you’ve ever made, everything could have been considered an option. Everything was a possibility at one point. In the end, your circumstances came into play and eliminated every possibility but one.

Fixed Outcomes

Every situation ends with just one option: the one that you choose. What’s interesting is that if time rewinds itself and you find yourself in the same exact situation with same exact circumstances, you’ll eliminate the same exact options in the same exact way and make the same exact decision. Imagine that time rewinds itself once more. You’ll make the same decision again. And again. Every time, you’ll make the same exact decision, without fail, because your circumstances are identical each and every time. So can you really say that you were the one who made the decision? Or was it your circumstances that made the decision for you?

You might go on to say, “Even if my circumstances lead me to act in certain ways, I’m the one processing those circumstances, so I’m still the one making the decisions.” Sure, you could say that. Your mind reacts to your circumstances in its own unique way and decides what you’ll do next, so you are the one making the decisions. But a pebble does the same thing. It takes in its circumstances — the people tossing it, the wind blowing it, the lightning striking it — and reacts to them in its own unique way and decides what it’ll do next: land in someone’s living room, roll across the street, or crumble to pieces. But hey, we agreed earlier that a mere inanimate object such as a pebble has no notion of free will, right? If that’s true, the same could be said about us.

You and the pebble

So what decides your fate? What leads you to make the decisions that you do? Your circumstances. Your personality, living conditions, skills, socioeconomic status, knowledge, past experiences, and so on decide what you’re going to do and what’s going to happen to you next. What awaits you in the future depends entirely on how the world is in the present.

Take a look around you and think about where you are right now. A year down the line, you could either be resting on a comfy living room couch, wandering the streets day and night, or falling apart completely.

You’re no different from the pebble.

If you read this, you had no choice. Maybe you found the title interesting, or maybe you just clicked on it by accident and started reading anyway. Whatever your circumstances were, the fact is that you ended up reading it — and that, too, becomes a circumstance in your life. So what’s your next move?