Less free will is good, actually
Date:
There's this one sci-fi short story called What's Expected of Us, that I quite enjoyed. It was published back in 2005 by Nature, though if you want, you can also read an archived copy of it.
The premise of the story is quite simple, there's a device called a Predictor:
By now you've probably seen a Predictor; millions of them have been sold by the time you're reading this. For those who haven't seen one, it's a small device, like a remote for opening your car door. Its only features are a button and a big green LED. The light flashes if you press the button. Specifically, the light flashes one second before you press the button.
It has a fictional circuit with a negative time delay, essentially it sends a signal back in time. From the perspective of the user, it is a device that predicts the future and which cannot be fooled: if you are going to press the button one second in the future, then the light will come on now, whereas if you won't press the button, there will be no light. Therefore, every time the light comes on, you will press the button shortly afterwards.
The focus in the story was not as much on the time travel aspect, but rather the implications of this: that there is a set future in which things go a particular way and from your present perspective, nothing you do can change it because every decision of yours, even ones to attempt changing things, are predetermined and participate in that future, you just don't know that you're going to make them until you do.
That is more or less the school of thought of determinism, which posits that there is no indeterminable force that's driving the universe, but rather that what happens is one long string of cause and effect. There is a bit more nuance to it and attempts at making determinism be compatible with the idea of free will, but the story simplifies things a bit.
In the story, this implied that there isn't free will, which sent a lot of people into a deep depressive state:
Typically, a person plays with a Predictor compulsively for several days, showing it to friends, trying various schemes to outwit the device. The person may appear to lose interest in it, but no one can forget what it means — over the following weeks, the implications of an immutable future sink in. Some people, realizing that their choices don't matter, refuse to make any choices at all. Like a legion of Bartleby the Scriveners, they no longer engage in spontaneous action. Eventually, a third of those who play with a Predictor must be hospitalized because they won't feed themselves. The end state is akinetic mutism, a kind of waking coma. They'll track motion with their eyes, and change position occasionally, but nothing more. The ability to move remains, but the motivation is gone.
From my perspective, the concept of not having free will doesn't sound that bad.
If you can calculate how thick the walls and the floors of a building need to be, for it to be safe, if you can calculate how much food of a certain kind you should eat, for you to be healthy, or even if it's possible to calculate how to get rockets into space, why wouldn't we be able to figure out how people react to certain stimuli, how they make decisions and what the larger implications of all that are for an entire society, or humanity as a whole?
The problem there, of course, is the fact that nobody has enough data to do all of that. Yet, if we assume that the entirety of a human being is contained within the body and we know that we're more or less very complex chemical computers, that we still obey the laws of physics fully, then it's not extreme to suggest that one's free will is at best an unsolved mathematical equation. Whether we can or we will ever be able to solve it doesn't even matter, just that there is one.
The thing is, that even if that was true, if all of the beliefs about determinism were true and the future was more or less predetermined, that doesn't really make me sad.
If nothing matters, then you're absolved of burden
Right now, I live in a time period of uncertainty. A period of illnesses sweeping the world, wars and armed conflict, the rise of authoritarian governments, countless types of hateful rhetoric, a world where the way how people engage with information screams "post-factual society" and probably the looming threat of a mass extinction of all sorts of both flora and fauna.
You can't really escape all of that, even if you don't listen to the news. For example, as yet another person that's employed in your typical 9-5 and therefore has to think about what will happen with the money I've earnt so far, the stock market feels very unstable due to various political factors and pulling my money out of it would just be choosing how much of it I want to lose vs leaving the investments alone - the value of which might recover years down the line, or not at all.
Even in regards to what happens there, I can't and won't be able to predict the future, at best I could make educated guesses, but even educating myself on all of the factors at play, over which I hold no sway, would just be an exercise in frustration and futility. Making oneself educated is okay, but attempting to intuit the future is like fighting against a windmill: with you only feeling that you're winning briefly, when the wind isn't blowing. In other words, that's just gambling with extra steps, but the same delusions behind it.
But for a second, imagine that whatever I'm going to do and what is going to happen is predetermined. If I lose a large chunk of my life savings, then I would have always lost it, it's just a waiting game for that moment to arrive and become my present. It's the same if I don't end up losing money, or even turn a profit. It's also the same in regards to any and every choice that I could make - which country to live in, which companies I choose to work for or whether I try to do some successful/unsuccessful entrepreneurship, what crafts and technologies I choose to invest my time into and get educated in and so on.
That doesn't mean that I need to be angsty when I say that "nothing matters", but rather, that both my good and bad decisions are just the logical outcomes of the string of events that is my life, from the moment that I was born to the events of the current day. Making those choices or even having the ability to make them is just a reflection of the circumstances that I'm in.
I have a lowest point that I'll go to in my life, as well as a highest point, a ceiling of sorts - I'm probably never going to be an astronaut, or a president, or even one of those fancy millionaires who spend their lives with the ability to use some of their money to take away plenty of the issues they face. Some day I will get old and struggle with poor health, just like everyone else. If nothing else, that just means that I shouldn't consider myself as one of those "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", John Steinbeck or Ronald Wright might have had a point.
As for my decisions, sometimes I will make them impulsively, sometimes I'll make them based on whatever information is available to me and it doesn't matter whether I was right or not in any of those instances. This also applies to other people: those who are good and help others will always have done so, whereas those who are selfish also will have been predetermined to function that way. Wars will happen, betrayal will happen, it would have always happened and we just reached the point in time where it has, without knowing what's next.
Why say all this? Because we shouldn't expect ourselves to be more than human, to live up to some contrived ideals.
I've seen people having so much anxiety about the seeming indeterminism in life and worrying about the choices that they need to make. I've been there myself, debating what sort of a degree I should get, what to do in regards to relationships, or even what technologies to try and explore in my career. Second guessing myself and also wondering about whether I should have done things differently in the past, to have fewer regrets. At the end of the day, some choices will be made anyways regardless of whether they're good or bad, sometimes you won't even get a choice, yet there's no reason to ruin one's own mental health by replaying it over and over again in your mind.
It doesn't seem like we frame things that way, though.
We should live with less worries and overthinking
Instead, we sometimes put the supposed human free will over almost any other factor, as opposed to viewing human beings as more predicable (and admittedly flawed) beings.
It's so deeply ingrained into us that we believe that people can fundamentally "change" when relationships are going badly or when someone is closed minded - not to say that people can't change, but rather that someone completely changing their mind is unlikely to the degree of it bordering wishful thinking. That's how you get people deluding themselves with reasons to stay in abusive relationships, or tolerating narcissists just because they're relatives or something.
Not to say that I'm perfect myself, even if in ways that are less harmful to others: I'm no stranger to having a bad sleep schedule, eating junk food, not really taking care of my body as well as I should, or even getting nitpicky and picking arguments that don't really matter and shouldn't have happened. I am, of course, working on self-improvement, but if I'd start having sleepless nights where I judge myself over my failures, you'd know that I've gotten lost in those unrealistic expectations towards success.
People shouldn't obsess over the idea of having to make the right choices to the degree of becoming sick with worry. I think what they should do instead is reframe things and put them in perspective: while we are each the main protagonist of our individual stories, in the grand scheme of things, most of the things we do are quite inconsequential. Why should I obsess over the investments if it does me no good? I'll just make a more or less educated decision when I feel that it's the right time and whatever happens, happens.
I'm also helping out a friend of mine that's in a difficult financial situation after going through chemo and not being able to work for a while. I still very much have those same concerns and worries about how much I should help them, but the more correct thing here is to shut that stupid little anxious voice in my mind and just help the person as best as I can - because it's quite literally a matter of either them being able to pay rent or ending up homeless.
I've also helped other friends and will have to keep doing that in the future, even with things like trying to donate towards improving the climate conditions, donating to those who are less fortunate and so on - regardless of exactly how much that matters in the grand scheme of things, because I'm destined to at least try, the same way how someone else might be destined to be way better at this than I am, or on the contrary, someone else is destined to do bad.
On the other hand, I've also cut people out of my life, when I felt that they don't embody the values that I want to associate with. People who are needlessly mean, the ones who are homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, whatever. Maybe I give a bit more leeway in regards to being cautious of other nations, given the history of mine and our Eastern neighbors, the government of which doesn't particularly want our country or culture to exist. Either way, you don't have to take the high road or try to appease everyone or even be the best person you can be.
On the same note, why should someone obsess over what degree to get? They already have a certain trajectory in life (e.g. Ivy League vs any number of other options, or no options at all) and even if they choose wrong or fail a few times, a few years of their life here or there won't radically change anything. They can always go back and get a different degree and if they can't, they might want to have a word or two with whatever higher deity might exist (or not).
You can't predict what is the "right" choice, so why hold yourself to that standard? It's the same in regards to employers, technologies, entire careers - the human life is thankfully so long that as long as you try your best, you'll probably be okay and if not, then chances are that it's outside of your control (e.g. entire economies and job markets being messed up beyond belief, which you can't fix).
Summary
I'm not saying that you need to live each of your days as it's your last, I'm actually suggesting that you should make what seem to be good decisions in the service of your future self, but the world is huge and human lives are long, so maybe don't worry too much the next time when you are faced with a decision of some sort. Have that late night snack when you shouldn't, skip writing code tests when you need to ship in a few hours, but do call your parents every now and then if they're nice people. We're all human beings, nobody is perfect, be good when you can.
Don't expect yourself to always succeed and whether it's something like the kinds of beliefs in Buddhism, or trying to practice mindfulness, or even believing that the free will presented to you is an illusion, you will only benefit from having any sort of a way to deal with whatever life throws at you and working on changing the things that you can change, while at the same time making peace with the things that you can't change.
Or, as a more positive reading of the sci-fi story would put it: what you are going to do is already decided in the future, and it's just waiting for you to make that your present.
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