Do you ever think about it--free will that is? Do you believe you possess it? Do you believe you are freely and deliberately choosing whether to zig or zag? Or do you go about your daily life not really paying much attention to whether you have free will or not...
are you just kinda-sorta living?
Personally, I can't explain why or when I started to give it some serious thought. Maybe it was just a natural, deterministic, switch that got triggered in my psyche and has since become a mild obsession. Is this me directing my daily activities or is this simply a play that I'm living out, the script already written by some thing or some one else?
Is life meaningful or is life absurd? I guess it depends on whether or not the time and the place you find yourself in is physically and psychologically good or not.
You might consider life meaningful if you are in good health, not hungry, sheltered, doing fulfilling work, feeling loved and loving others, and navigating from place to place without fear of being assaulted, imprisoned, or killed. If you and the people you care about are all experiencing the same good fortune, then I would say you are incredibly blessed, and I hope it all continues that way indefinitely.
Unfortunately, for most of humanity, shit happens. It varies in degrees ranging from extreme poverty to spilling your latte on the way to an appointment and everything in between: illness, general familial/social dysfunction, political turmoil... and on and on.
We can all point to events where things went wrong; where we were blindsided by circumstances beyond our control that propelled us down the road of "the unforeseen". Were they random or determined? You happen to be where you are right now... why? Did you wake up one morning smiling and grateful, or was it a WTF moment?
I believe we suffer from the illusion that we are in the driver's seat, deciding whether to turn left, right, move forward or stop. Each moment in time, fleeting like frames in a movie, projected on the screen for a split second followed by the next frame and the next. There doesn't seem to be an exit ramp that allows us to go back in time or fast-forward to a future time. It is just moment by moment, frame-by-frame, existence intersecting in space and time with other people's moments--bumper car events cascading into other moments.
Maybe it all began when we opened our eyes for the first time and started exploring the world around us. We were conceived and birthed by a pair of "others" who consciously, or unconsciously, introduced you/us into the world. Not your choice to be born, ignorant of what lay ahead. Was it ordained by some higher power that you would land where you did or was it simply a random act that brought you here? And whose decision was it that you would eventually die? Could it be that your life ends here and is taken up again some other place, occupying some other form of energy, ignorant of all that came before?
... or what? Don't worry, it will all unfold whether you think and do, or not.
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