Free Will Doesn’t Exist

Rarely do I ever reflect on the fact that all of my life, as well as all of the people I am connected to, are the result of chance encounters. None of this was completely under my control. While I do have some sort of say in what I would like to do and where I would like go with my life, I have little control over the actual circumstances or experiences that are tied to these events. I did not choose where to be born, who my family would be, which genes would make up my being. What I look like, how much money I was born into, and which demons I would possess were also out of my control. 

This makes me wonder if free will is just an illusion. Maybe we have control over ourselves to an extent, but it is much smaller than we dare to admit. Can free will exist if our choices are limited to the range of options offered by the particular space and time we are in? 

The experiences I have in my life are limited to this very specific part of human history that I exist within. This small, maybe 80 years or so, part of all existence is the only one I am guaranteed. Out of all the places I could be in the world, I can only be in one at a time. At of all the places in the universe I could potentially be, I live on Earth. I take up an insignificantly small space in relation to an infinitely large plane of existence. 

Every place I go to, I have the opportunity to connect with another person who happens to be crossing my path at the same time and space that I happen to be in that same time and space. What are the chances that all of the people who are in my life would be people in my life? What are the odds that we would be born within this particular point in history, residing in the same geographic location, sharing something in common that bonds us to the point where we now consider ourselves friends? 

If we think of human beings as points on a graph throughout the course of our entire human civilization, using a timeline that goes from the very start to the very end, we will see how small and insignificant we actually are. In relation to the vastness of the universe, we are nothing at all. These 80 years will pass and an entirely new generation of beings will take our place. They will have a very limited time to explore and then cease to exist as well. 

When I think about how small I am in relation to the entire universe, to the entirety of existence, I wonder why anything really matters at all. We, as humans, love to create meaning. We love conceptualization. We’ve created culture, language, and society. All of these things existed in our own minds and we projected these visions onto the environment around us. We created meaning where meaning did not exist in the first place. These rules that govern our world were made up. 

Every point in human history had different rules. These rules are constantly changing and evolving. We take them to be facts. They govern the way we think, the choices we make, and leave very little room for our own decisions. With all of these factors that are predetermined, can we really say that we are free? But, a more important question is, why does freedom matter at all?