submit to the fate of your own free will

why free will doesn't really matter to stoics

What is free will? Is it not being constrained by the environment and making decisions based on some innate quality we possess?

Consider the people born to poverty and violence, who deal in drugs or sell their bodies. The believers in fate point to them and say: 'See how circumstances shape us!' But place before them the wealthy man poisoning himself with excess, the celebrity lost in hollow pleasures and shallow connections, and suddenly their compassion vanishes. Now they speak of choice and responsibility. See how they apply their philosophy only where it suits them: downward for excuses, never upward for understanding. And when someone rises from their squalor, they call this mere fortune or cheating, not the triumph of will over circumstance. The fatalists love to strip agency from virtue while excusing vice.

On the other side, we have the freedom hoarders, who believe that actualization is the accumulation of options, and that will is a force that transcends physical causation. They spend their lives collecting possibilities like trophies, convinced that more choices equal more freedom. But watch them: paralyzed by infinite menus, exhausting themselves in futile rebellion against every constraint they encounter. They rage against 'the system' like capricious teenagers. They waste their strength fighting the riverbed instead of working with the current. In demanding absolute freedom, they become absolutely ineffective. Their search for transcendence becomes their prison.

My case is this: free will doesn't matter; we're all born into biological bodies, cultural contexts, family dynamics, and historical moments, not in a metaphysical dimension. If constraint exists everywhere—in poverty and privilege, in scarcity and abundance—then maybe we're asking the wrong question about free will.

Take the paradox of the crystal ball. If you foresee yourself failing in the crystal ball, you'll try to prevent it. If you see success, you might become complacent and carelessly cause failure. But let's say you believe in destiny, and everything happens as you observe it in the crystal ball. Then knowing your future is pointless anxiety. In both scenarios, looking at the future was useless.

The real point is that you don't need free will to make the best choices and decisions—quite the opposite. You don't need endless options, but rather a limited selection. You need to filter before discerning.

The Stoic vision says you have control only over your choices and your internal landscape. That is free will. There may not exist the best option or path for you, but there exists a series of poor choices that will lead you to enslave yourself. Our goal isn't to open endless doors for the sake of it, but to close the doors we no longer belong in, to strip away identities that no longer serve us. There's a reason freedom is associated with feeling lighter.

One of the most surreal conversations I've ever had was with a close friend. We were complete opposites in everything—gender, political vision, and mindset. I had lucky girl syndrome; he thought everyone was conspiring against him. I was sanguine; he was melancholic.

He was complaining about life. I told him he could change. He replied he couldn't because all his life experiences and background had programmed him to lack determination and agency. I told him he was wasting my time.

Why? He could describe his limitations, analyze them, even trace their origins. But he chose to surrender to them by not changing. How can someone surrender to themselves? And yet, the majority of us are.

We always associate choice with action. But non-acting is a choice.

How many times have we had to do something for a long time, but instead we say, "No, not today."

How many things in our daily lives do we come across in our relationships, and things that we observe in ourselves? Maybe we want to stop smoking. And no one is forcing us to smoke except ourselves. And we choose to do nothing about it because, "Oh, it's stressful at work right now," or "after vacation."

So we put the things we are not wholly in control of—and therefore not responsible for—in front of and above things that we are in control of and accountable for.

So, how can we say we don't have free will when we're not even trying? Every time we smoke a cigarette, we choose not to quit. Every time we postpone the hard conversation with our loved friend or partner, we choose silence.

The enemy of free will isn't determinism, but the victim mindset—the conspiring certainty that free will doesn't exist, that our thoughts are just reflections of our environment and story. That if we're born slaves, we'll always perpetuate slavery.

The freedom hoarders suffer from the same victimhood, just inverted: they're victims of a world that won't give them infinite options, prisoners of their impossible standards for what freedom should look like.

Both camps refuse to work with what they have, preferring instead to blame their circumstances, whether they are too constraining or not free enough.

But yes, it's true. Our minds are porous. We're conditioned by society, by our parents. Even our rebellion is somehow manufactured by our hormones. I don't have an answer for when and how we gain self-awareness. It's a process that can't be intellectualized. But once you gain self-awareness, you have responsibility. Like my friend, who understood that "I lack discipline by design," this is why he was overweight. No one was forcing him to eat, except himself. And having this self-consciousness, he deliberately chose to ignore it.

The paradox here is how determinist believers display significant agency and deliberate choices while refusing to take responsibility for them. I believe this is the first step towards evil: succumbing to and surrendering, denying your own agency, deferring responsibility to the Universe, and choosing anger and resentment.

How can these thoughts help you escape slavery? They don't. They make you complacent about your prison, and you know it.

But complacency itself is a choice, my friend.

So tell me again: are you sure your self-sabotage wasn't a choice?

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