Beautiful Lies We Tell Ourselves About Freedom
The Illusion of Free Will
Free will. Two small words, heavy with hope and fear. I’ve spent countless nights wrestling with the idea that maybe I'm not the master of my fate at all. Deep down, a part of me is terrified by the thought that my choices might not really be mine. Perhaps you know that feeling too, that quiet panic that if free will isn’t real, then who are we? We cling to the idea that we are in control because imagining the alternative is almost too much to bear.
I often tell myself “I chose this path”, trying to silence the nagging doubt that something else might be pulling the strings. Believing I have free will makes me feel powerful, responsible, human. And yet, there's a paradox here: it’s often our fear of being powerless that drives us to insist so strongly that we do have power. We declare, “Of course I have free will!” Not so much because we’re sure of it, but because the opposite idea shakes us to our core. If I admit I might not be in control, what does that say about me? What does it say about all my ambitions, my mistakes, my dreams? It's as if by believing hard enough in my freedom, I can ward off the unsettling possibility that I am not free at all.
The Fear of Losing Control
We humans are funny in our contradictions. We praise the virtues of being in control of our destiny, yet we also find comfort in blaming fate when things go wrong. Have you ever noticed how quick we are to take credit for our successes (“I worked so hard, I made it happen”) but how easily we blame outside forces for our failures? “The universe had other plans… It wasn’t my choice… It was out of my hands.” In one breath we trumpet our freedom, and in the next we absolve ourselves of it. We swing between wanting total control and secretly wishing that we aren’t actually responsible for everything that happens.
I see this tug-of-war inside myself. Why am I so eager to assert that I am choosing, if not because I fear the thought that my choices might be illusions? The belief in free will often feels like a security blanket, warm and reassuring in a cold, chaotic world. Wrap yourself in the blanket, and you can believe every step you take is your own, every detour deliberate. Take the blanket away, and suddenly the world feels drafty and unpredictable. The truth is, it can be scarier to think I’m not in control than to face any specific outcome. So we hold on tight to our sense of agency, even when cracks in that story start to show. We prefer the comfort of believing “I’m in charge” over the discomfort of asking, “Then who or what is running the show, if not me?”
But here’s the irony: our desperate need to feel in control can make us blind to all the ways we aren’t. It’s like holding your eyes shut and claiming the darkness is all there is. In convincing ourselves we have absolute free will, we may overlook the subtle truth that much of what we do, think, and desire arises without our conscious command. By fearing the loss of control, we perhaps have already given up a kind of honest understanding of ourselves. We’ve traded truth for comfort. What if, instead of fearing the loss of control, we stared that fear in the face? We might start to see that free will is not a black-and-white issue. Maybe, just maybe, not being fully in control is not the end of the world, but the beginning of a deeper humility.
Shiny Objects, Hidden Strings
Under the scorching Australian sun, a male jewel beetle clings to a discarded brown beer bottle, fervently trying to mate with it. In the beetle’s tiny mind, he has found the most gorgeous partner ever: shiny, amber, and dappled with enticing little bumps. He doesn’t realize it's just a piece of glass. He’s been fooled by a perfect illusion, a quirk of evolution that made him attracted to certain shapes and colors. That beer bottle is triggering his instincts in all the right (and wrong) ways. He’ll stay there for hours under the heat, convinced he’s pursuing his heart’s desire, when in reality he’s wasting his life on an empty bottle. He might even die there, never understanding what went wrong.
Watching that beetle, I can’t help but feel a pang of recognition. Because aren’t we a lot like him sometimes? Our world is full of beer bottles, not literally, but in the form of modern temptations and high-tech lures that mimic what we think we want. Think about the glowing screen of a phone that we can’t stop staring at, or the endless scroll of social media that keeps us hooked even when we’re exhausted. These things catch our eye like that bottle caught the beetle. We scroll and click, scroll and click, as if compelled by some outside force that knows exactly how to grip us. In theory, I can put my phone down whenever I want (I have free will, don’t I?) Yet hours slip by, and here I am, still tapping and swiping, as if under a spell.
It’s no accident, either. There are incredibly smart algorithms and artificial intelligences working behind those screens, studying our every move. They learn what excites you, what enrages you, what makes you pause for just one second longer. They serve up an irresistible feed of exactly what will hold your attention. It’s psychological manipulation, accelerated and fine-tuned beyond anything we’ve experienced before. We have apps that know how to make us crave the next dopamine hit, just like fast food companies know how to make us crave the next bite by layering fat, sugar, and salt. Our ancestors evolved to love the sweetness of ripe fruit; today, we’re handed a supersized dessert that our brains can’t say no to. We get addicted to the stimulation, whether it’s the sugar or the scroll. In a way, we become controlled by our cravings. Are we really choosing to indulge, or are we reacting to a stimulus that’s been carefully designed to override our resistance?
Every time I reach absentmindedly for my phone, I think of that beetle glued to the beer bottle. He imagines he’s doing the most important thing in the world, following a desire that feels utterly real. It’s not so different from how I feel when I need to check a notification or when I start getting anxious the moment I’m offline. How free is my will in that moment? Am I any freer than the beetle driven by instinct? The modern world presents us with so many “shiny bottles”: the curated shopping catalog that convinces us we must have that item, the autoplay video that leads us through a chain of content we never planned to watch, the dating app that keeps us swiping as if love is just one more swipe away. We have built these technologies, but now they pull at our strings in ways we struggle to resist. It’s a humbling thought: we believed we were the ones in control, the clever tool-makers bending the environment to our will. Yet here we are, often bent into shapes of desire that tech companies and advertisers choose for us. If free will means the ability to choose according to our deepest wishes, what do we call it when those wishes themselves are engineered from the outside?
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
Amid all these external influences, there’s another layer of complexity: the internal voices that drive us. I like to think I know myself, that I am the one deciding what to do at any given moment. But who is that I? Sometimes I feel like a collection of different selves, each with its own agenda. One part of me wants to get up early to exercise, another part insists on snoozing the alarm and curling up for just five more minutes. I can promise myself to quit a bad habit with every ounce of sincerity (and truly mean it in that moment) only to find another part of me breaking that promise a day later. We are walking contradictions. We want change and we resist change. We seek freedom and we find new ways to shackle ourselves. It’s as if inside each of us, there’s a quiet civil war between what we believe we should do and what some deeper impulse pushes us to do.
How do we make sense of this conflict? We turn to language and stories. We narrate our lives in our minds, trying to make all the pieces fit a coherent plot. “I yelled at my friend because I was having a bad day.” “I ate that entire cake because I decided I deserved a treat.” “I keep staying in this toxic relationship because maybe I'm destined to help them.” Listen to these explanations – we all have our versions. They might be true, or they might be convenient fictions. We use words to paper over the gaps in our understanding of ourselves. Our minds don’t like feeling out of control, so they manufacture reasons, stringing together a tale that makes it seem as if everything we did was purposeful. In reality, maybe I yelled at my friend simply because anger flared up and overrode my kindness; the story I tell (“bad day”) comes after the explosion, not really before it. Maybe I ate the cake because my body’s sugar craving shouted louder than my diet plan, and my narrative of “I deserve this” was just a rationalization cooked up afterward to make me feel in charge again.
Language is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it’s how we express our deepest feelings and reflections; right now I’m using language to share these very thoughts with you. It allows us to describe our world and ourselves. On the other hand, language can trap us. We start to believe that if we have a word for something, we truly understand it. Free will is a term, a handy label to describe a mysterious experience of making choices. But having the label doesn’t necessarily mean we grasp what’s underneath. Words like “choice,” “self,” “soul,” or “mind” are powerful, yet they can give a false confidence. I can say “I chose to do that,” but those words gloss over the millions of hidden factors that led to that action – from the neurons firing in my brain, to the emotions swirling in my chest, to the subtle social pressures I might not even notice. The language wraps it all up in a neat package: a choice. And so I believe the story that I, a single unified self, made a free choice for clear reasons.
What if reality is far messier? It likely is. We are influenced by childhood memories that we don’t even consciously recall, by the mood that a cloudy day casts over us, by the last song that played on the radio. We’re shaped by the culture that raised us, the people around us, the biology inside us. These forces speak in sensations and urges, not in words. Then our poor verbal mind scrambles to keep up, to justify, to organize it into something sensible. It’s trying to impose order after the fact. I find this both humbling and strangely beautiful: humbling because it shows me I am not the all-knowing narrator of my life, and beautiful because it means life is richer and deeper than the simple stories I tell. The limits of our language, the limits of our understanding – they hint that there’s more to “me” and “you” than we can ever pin down with labels. Perhaps accepting that is the first step towards true self-awareness.
Beyond the Illusion of Control
So, is free will just an illusion? In my heart, I feel it is, at least in the absolute way we often want it to be. But this isn't a tragedy; it’s more like an invitation to let go of a heavy burden. For so long, I thought I had to be everything: the sole author of my story, the hero who makes all the right choices, the one to blame when things fell apart. If I didn’t steer every moment with perfect clarity, I feared I was failing at life. Now I’m starting to see it differently. There is a great relief in acknowledging that I’m not controlling every twist and turn. Life flows through us as much as we try to direct it. Realizing that free will might be an illusion is not the end of meaning, it can be the beginning of true meaning, the kind that isn’t forced or manufactured, but arises naturally when we stop pretending to be in total control.
When I surrender to this flow, I discover something unexpected: compassion. If I’m not 100% the captain of my ship, then neither is anyone else. That person who hurt me, or the one who disappointed me – they might have been driven by their own wounds and unseen forces, just as I am by mine. This understanding doesn’t excuse harmful actions, but it frames them in a way that makes forgiveness feel more possible. We’re all caught in this strange human condition together, doing our best under the circumstances, often unaware of why we do what we do. When I see how little of my own behavior is truly “chosen” in the way I imagined, I can extend that gentleness to others. My anger softens, my judgment eases. In place of those, something profound can bloom: unconditional love.
Unconditional love means loving without expecting anything in return, without needing someone to be a certain way. It’s the kind of love that doesn’t keep score of choices or mistakes. And maybe that’s the kind of love that makes sense in a world where free will is not absolute. If I love you, I don’t love you because you’ve exercised your free will correctly or because you’ve chosen me. I love you because you are, because in this vast, uncontrollable dance of life, our hearts found each other. That love isn’t a decision or a contract; it feels more like a truth that reveals itself when all the noise settles.
I want to end by telling you why I even explore these heavy thoughts and share them. It’s because I care. I care about understanding myself, I care about you, and I care about the truth, as uncomfortable as it can be. This journey of questioning everything, even the reality of our own free will, is one I’ve been on for a long time. And it’s far from over. In fact, I’ve poured these reflections and so much more into my upcoming book They Lied To You. The title speaks to exactly what we’ve been talking about: the comfortable stories and lies we cling to, and the astonishing, sometimes liberating truths behind them. If what you've read here resonated with you, if it made your heart stir or your mind crack open even a little, then I invite you to continue the journey with me. They Lied To You goes even deeper down the rabbit hole of understanding the self and the world, and I truly believe it will leave you just as speechless and wide-eyed as I have been while writing it.
I would be honored if you chose to preorder They Lied To You or buy my current book I Hope You Wake Up. Your support means more than I can express; it’s like having a friend walking beside me on this path of discovery. Either way, whether you read more of my words or not, know that I am here, quietly sending you love. Not a fickle love, not a conditional love, but the kind that remains steady through every twist of fate and every questioning of reality. Thank you for sharing this moment with me, for daring to question one of the most cherished illusions we have. Remember, no matter what you decide, no matter what life decides for you: I love you, unconditionally, always.