Free Will Is Just a Chance to Be Better
The existence of free will — the notion that we have choice in our actions — is an oft debated and particularly interesting topic to me. I was once offered by a student leadership group at the University of Colorado to debate Sam Harris, a modern day philosopher and neuroscientist whose specialty is in this very subject. Harris is an ardent believer that we are essentially an algorithm of our DNA plus the summation of our life experiences — give you Jeffrey Dahmer’s exact DNA and lifetime and you would be a cannibal. Which is why, for the same reason I declined that offer, I won’t spend much time on whether we have free will or not. I don’t believe free will is just an illusion, or for that matter you or I could just as easily be a cannibal. This latin expression sums it up best for me: Astra inclinant, sed non obligant.
The stars incline us, they do not bind us.
Our actions are most certainly inclined by our genetic code and experiences, but we are not determined by them. But, because this is an impossible argument to prove on either side, I tend to spend more time thinking about these actions of inclination. For me, then, there are three categories within which our actions fall.
How we treat ourselves
How we treat others
How we react to whatever happens to us
Look at each one of these three carefully and what do you see? It surprised me when I wrote them down, but I see others — people who I admire and respect because of how healthy and grounded they are, and people who are just spiraling downward in the worst kind of way because they are not growing. They refuse to, in fact.
Take the first category, how we treat ourselves. I can choose to do a line of cocaine when I wake up, or I can choose to go trail run at 6:00 in the morning. Not to minimize the power of chemical addiction, but the point stands in lieu of such circumstances — for me, without such an addiction (although arguably I might be addicted to running), the choice is mine. And it repeats all day long with everything I do. At the grocery store, as trivial as it may sound, I can choose to bring home nachos or, say, an avocado.That is my choice. I can’t blame what I do — be it failing to run when I’m healthy or failing to buy something nutritional when I set a goal to be more healthy — on anyone else. Think of the people you’ve encountered in your life who do just that, who consistently blame others for their mistakes. Where are they now? Are they growing? Are they making decisions they know they should and can make?
Are you?
Which brings me to my new favorite quote: “Draw a line. And live above it.” That line is pretty clear with how I treat myself, and it should be to most people. We know what makes us thrive. We can choose to do so. Or we can choose to be self-destructive. But barring real mental illness or addictions, the choice is truly ours. Take comfort in that! Every day is a chance to be a better version of yourself. And each day is a chance you get only once.
How we treat others, again, is a choice. One of the [diminishing] number of good things about aging, for me at least and I suspect for most, is we get better at this over time. You learn, for example, to express more how you feel. I won’t belabor this point because I’ve already written about it, which was in, I think, my most personal writing I have shared, here. It should be obvious to just about anyone if you are succeeding in how you treat others or not. Just take a half a minute to objectively take stock of your last week. Even within that narrow timeframe, you were placed in situations where you could act with compassion or hostility toward others. What did you do? Again, there is always a choice. Again, you can do better tomorrow if you choose to. Embrace that.
How we react to what happens to us is what brought me here today to write this artice, as I just finished reading for the second time Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel. It is also, I believe, the most difficult of the three categories. It would be impossible to summarize Frankel’s life-changing book in just a short blog, but I will quote him to try to do so. Because despite losing his wife, father, mother and brother in concentration camps during the holacaust, Frankel wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Frankel put this in writing after he was liberated from 3 years as a prisoner in concentration camps: starved, sick, tortured, and humiliated for much of that time. In 9 days he wrote an entire book about choice, meaning, and optimism that derived from three years of pain and grief. So yes, I firmly believe that while we all, at times, react too quickly and too emotionally when we feel we are wronged, that does not have to be the case. I have learned that when I step away for a period of time and let my intellectual side think on how someone has treated me, I can change how I respond to a situation for the better. If I am not saying this well, and I don’t think I particularly am, I would encourage you to read Frankel’s book. Or another: The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. I think you will come out a believer that every challenge is a chance for you to choose to be better.
I will quote Sam Altman, author of How to be Successful, to summarize my belief system here:
"A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are.”
I challenge you to accept that you can control how you treat yourself, others, and how you react to the obstacles life will invariably throws at you. I challenge you because I ran this morning at 6:00 AM, and every step I took I had the joy of feeling I was getting just a bit better — and that the choice was mine.