The first book I truly loved as a kid was The Hobbit. My older cousin had hyped it a lot before lending me his copy and in spite of the higher expectations I found it amazing. Then I moved on to the trilogy and my mind was blown away. I read those books every year for 3 or 4 years and although I truly enjoyed them, it was never the same as the first time.

Have you ever felt like that? Wishing you could wipe the memories of a book or movie to enjoy it for the first time again?

Chances are you have. If not, I bet you can recall a moment in your life that felt transformational, world-changing, after which life was never going to be the same.

These things always seem to take us by surprise, an external force that obliterated our mind’s defenses, installing a memory or feeling forever.

Those are obvious examples, but if we pay attention we’ll see this happens all the time. If you’re reading this and understand my words, something will have triggered in your mind over which you have no control whatsoever.

Now I’ll make a case for us not having free will. If contemplating this idea makes you uncomfortable, watch some Joe Pera content on YouTube. I used to feel very anxious about not having free will, I’d be in denial, “how could I not have free will, I’m free to do what I want”.

There is no free will because we have no control over what happens in our minds. If we had, we would be able to react to stimuli in the same way every time. If we had, we could fight what gets or not triggered in our minds. We could force ourselves to experience that film or book like it was the first time. Alas, we cannot. Under the same circumstances, we will always act the same way. All those times we told ourselves “if I could do things again, I’d try something different” we’re assuming we would have our current knowledge of things. Instinctively, we know we’d make the same mistakes.

Going deeper into the rabbit hole, if we have no control over what happens in our minds, are we really different from other animals? We presupone a degree of control, a degree of free will. Is this warranted? Natural disasters or wild animals harming people make us feel very differently than people harming other people. Should we be more forgiving, considering no one has free will? Maybe this is going too far. Better minds than mine have discussed this at length, go and read them.

Let’s go back to the basics: we can’t control what happens in our minds. We can predict our next thoughts just as well as we can explain the ones that brought us here… we can’t. Almost like we are separate individuals from our minds or bodies. Maybe that’s a big aspect of it, this apparent disconnection makes us think we are independent agents, the ego and our thoughts, mind and body.

The reality is we are not. Our thoughts, our consciousness, our bodies, they’re all connected, they’re just one. We’re just one entity, or more accurately a very complex system, with parallel threads and processes. There is no free will as there is no of self.

Some people say these are the illusions of free will and the self. Maybe even calling them illusions is incorrect! An illusion implies you’re somehow able to see through it, that eventually you realize you are wrong. But there is no way for us to see free will as an illusion, we are the illusion.

What to do then? How to face life knowing we are not in control, or as much in control, as we thought? I have no idea. To start, I’ll try to be more forgiving with people around me.