Consider your desire to be volatile and impulsive - consider how in many cases, you'll want something only for as long as you don't have it - once you achieve it, once you have it in your hands, it quickly becomes rather irrelevant. In a way this is unreasonable. We will chase something with huge amounts of effort only to realize the result wasn't all that desirable. If our decisions are based on what we desire, then our decisions, our free will too, becomes volatile, impulsive, erratic - those are the choices we make that are made on that "gut feeling".

There is another option here: Making decisions based on rationality. For instance take a scenario where our personal interest might be in option A, yet we might settle on option B if it's significant for someone else or a group we belong to. Similarly, we can decide to opt for delayed gratification in a given situation, even if instant gratification might be much more enticing to us. Such decisions are based on our rational, based on our ability to analyze, compare and consider a multitude of factors to any choices presented to us. How we prioritize these factors, how we rationally decide which one is the "correct" choice for us, is based solely on experience and expectations - though I believe the latter, expectation, is also based on our previous experiences.

So on one hand, we make decisions based on an impulse we can't really explain, on the other hand, we make decisions based on what happened to us in the past. At this point though, we can take a look at how our experiences are shaped - not by ourselves but by everything that is external - or more precisely by how we interact with the external, by our relationship with everything that isn't us - the outside world.

Take a child for instance. A child is naturally curious about ANYTHING. It will try to engage with whatever it comes across. A child does not make decisions like an adult does. In fact, you could argue a young child does not make decisions at all. Rather, they jump at whatever pulls their interest first - it is quite similar, if not the same, to the "gut feeling"-decisions I mentioned earlier - what is certain is that it's not rational at all. So if the experiences we make first are not based on rationality - but rationality is based on our experiences - are our rational decisions even rational at all? Even the application of education does not lift this predicament. If our upbringing leads us to a point that does not meet our expectations (which again, are likely based on previous experience), we'll take an extra effort to stir in the other direction - that is displayed for example in the rebellious phase of a teenager.


So then, can we say that the way how our will operates is determined from the earliest periods of our life? Well, not quite. Because a single influence from outside can completely shatter our previous world-view in an instance. We are in constant motion - the internal me and the external world, always dancing with eachother- our thoughts, our experiences, our desires are constantly challenged and changed through the interactions we have with everything and everyone else. Likewise, we're always "the external" to someone else. We are constantly shaping and being shaped by the world.

Whether this implies free will or if it implies destiny is a matter of taste (or faith, if you want) - it's either all order, or all chaos - but beneath and above every order lies chaos and vice versa. Likewise, what you make of "god" is personal preference. But let's do go there and imagine we are indeed god as some form of conscious being (or non-being).


Imagine you are exactly as the bible suggests - omnipotent, omniscientific, all-powerful and all-knowing. From the very beginning of your existence, you would be bored of yourself and everything else - afterall, you've already seen it all, you've already experienced it all. As god, you would never be able to surprise or entertain yourself. There is however, one possible solution to this problem: You surrender your consciousness. You come up with an universal system that nurtures and maintains itself - you build everything under the fundamental principle to expand and propagate - from the motions of the universe to any organism. Once you've set up the rules, the laws of physics and life itself, you just let go of all control. You delegate all control to your creation - they shall manage and maintain themselves and each other. You surrender your consciousness and surprise yourself at last, through the limited consciousness of your own creation.

In that sense, I don't think reality is good or bad - those are terms that humans invented to begin with. I think reality is more playful than that. It is like art, following no purpose other than to be witnessed.