A Note on Free Will

This chapter will undoubtedly be uncomfortable for a large percentage of readers. That is precisely why it is the first one. If you can sit with what follows, I genuinely believe the rest of this book will feel like smooth water. The difficult part is here, at the beginning, where it belongs.

So. Free will. Most people reading that phrase will feel a quiet confidence about what it means. Free will is you choosing to read the next line. Free will is you deciding to close this book, get up, and make a cup of tea. Free will is you resolving, tonight, to finally go for that run. Notice the word that binds all of these sentences together: choose. Free will, at its core, is the belief that you are the author of your choices. That when you deliberate and decide, something irreducibly you is doing the deciding.

I am going to gently suggest that this is not quite what is happening.

But before I make that case, let me explain why it matters. Because on the surface, free will seems like a philosophical puzzle with no practical consequence. A dinner party argument. An interesting abstraction. What, a reasonable person might ask, does the metaphysics of choice have to do with being happier?

Grant me one premise, which I think is genuinely difficult to dispute: happiness is a product of brain chemistry. Your emotions, your experiences, your memories, the warmth you feel when someone you love walks into the room, the dread that arrives at three in the morning uninvited — all of it is the product of a constellation of neurons in your brain, firing in patterns of extraordinary complexity. There is no happiness that exists separately from this. Joy is not floating somewhere above your body, occasionally descending. It is electrochemical. It is biological. It is, in the most literal sense, a brain event.

And free will is also a brain event. The experience of choosing, deliberating, deciding — this too is neural. It arises from the same organ, through the same mechanisms. Which means that how we understand free will is not separate from how we understand happiness. It is foundational to it.

Consider how a nuclear engineer must understand the behaviour of subatomic particles before they can design a reactor that reliably produces light. Or how a bridge builder must command Newtonian physics before a structure can hold weight across a river. In both cases, a misunderstanding of the underlying reality does not just produce an incorrect theory. It produces a bridge that falls. If we are going to pursue happiness, which is the most important thing most of us will ever do, we had better understand something true about the nature of the system we are working with. If our foundation is wrong, we are not merely inefficient. We are chasing the light with our backs to the sun.

This is why free will is Chapter One. Not because it is the most immediately practical topic in this book, but because it is the most foundational. Get this wrong and every chapter that follows is built on sand. Get it right, or at least closer to right, and the rest of what follows has somewhere solid to stand. By the end of this chapter we will have a concrete image for all of this, one that will reappear in every chapter that follows. It is worth reading to the end.

Take two people, born the same year, to similar families, with similar educations. One grew up near a lake. The other grew up inland, near a canyon. Without knowing anything else about either of them, I would bet, at reasonable confidence, that the one near the lake has fished more in their life than the one near the canyon. Not because I know their personalities. Not because I have any special information about them. Simply because access shapes behaviour. Proximity is a cause. Opportunity is a cause. Neither of them chose where they were born.

Now here is the part worth sitting with. If you asked each of them why they fish or do not fish, they would give you reasons. Preference. Interest. How they feel like spending a Saturday. They would experience those reasons as genuine, as theirs, as chosen. And in a narrow sense, they are. But the deeper cause, the one that made a Saturday by the lake feel like a reasonable thing to want, was written before they ever cast a line. The choice is real. The freedom of the choice is a very different matter.

I want to try something. Read the following list once, without much thought:

Ocean. River. Boat. Lighthouse. Paddle. Life jacket.

Now, without deliberating, name the first thing that comes to your mind. Anything at all.

I am guessing it was not the migratory patterns of Arctic terns. Or the interior of a submarine. Or the taste of a stamp. It was probably something adjacent to that list. A wave, maybe. Salt air. A dock at the end of a summer evening. Something in that neighbourhood.

Seriously think about this for a second. I asked you to think of absolutely anything. Infinite possibilities, each one equally likely if we truly had free will. A completely uniform, flat distribution. Every thought you have ever had, every fact you have ever learned, every name, place, sensation, and half-remembered Tuesday — all of it sitting at identical odds. Instead, the probability of landing on something water-adjacent, or on what you did this morning before you opened this book for that matter, inflated beyond all proportion. Certain things became almost inevitable. Others, things you technically know just as well, vanished from the draw entirely. That is barely an exaggeration. The distribution was not flat. It was never flat.

This is not a trick. It is physics. Your brain is a prediction engine, constantly using prior context to weight what comes next. The list primed you. It loaded a context, narrowed the distribution, and then delivered what felt like a free thought that was never entirely free.

Now extend that to everything. Your genes primed you before your first experience. Your childhood loaded contexts you have been drawing on ever since. Every conversation, every fear, every joy, every book, every quiet loss has been adjusting the weights the whole time. The thoughts that feel most freely yours, the ones you identify with most strongly, are often the ones most thoroughly shaped by everything that came before them. The distribution of who you were ever going to be was never flat.

This is the argument I find most compelling, not because it comes from a laboratory, but because you just felt it.

Have I convinced you? I suspect not. And I want to say something important about that.

As human beings, we are deeply invested in the idea that we have agency. That our choices carry weight. That we are not, as the reductive version of this argument sometimes implies, mere biological machines executing code we did not write. We want to know that when we decide to be kind, or to work hard, or to love someone, that decision is genuinely ours. Some people would argue that this sense of authorship is precisely what makes us human.

To which I would ask, gently: does it matter?

When you are fully absorbed in a film, do you stop to remind yourself that the characters are not real and therefore the story has no meaning? When a novel breaks your heart, do you refuse to feel it because the people in it never existed? Of course not. We find profound meaning in fiction, sometimes more than in fact. The experience is real even when the premise is constructed. The same, I would argue, is true of free will. You can understand it to be an illusion and still live inside it fully. I do. I am not immune to the experience of deliberating and deciding. I still feel the pull of choices. I still take genuine pleasure in an ocean at dusk, still laugh too loudly in pubs with people I love. The philosophical question and the lived experience do not have to be at war with each other.

And before you conclude that I am telling you to go rob a bank because nothing is your fault: I am not. Actions should absolutely have consequences. We imprison people who are dangerous not because they are guilty in some cosmic sense but because society requires protection, and because consequences are themselves one of the inputs that shape future behaviour. Structure matters. Accountability matters. The absence of free will is not a permission slip. It is a different way of understanding the same world we all have to live in together.

Here is what the absence of free will actually gives you, if you let it.

Think of the person who cut you off on the highway last week. The boss who snapped at you over something small. The version of yourself that keeps failing to follow through on the things you genuinely want to do. Now sit with the possibility that none of those people, including you, were operating with clean, uncaused agency. That the driver was the product of a morning you know nothing about, a childhood you know even less about, a nervous system shaped by forces that preceded his birth. That your boss is not a villain exercising tyrannical free will but a person battered, like all of us, by factors that accumulated long before he walked into that room.

There is something else worth sitting with here, something I find quietly liberating every time I return to it. Right now, without any conscious input from you, your liver is filtering toxins from your blood. Your heart is beating. Your immune system is identifying threats and dispatching responses. Trillions of cells are doing extraordinarily complex work, and not one of them is waiting for your permission. Nobody finds this troubling. Nobody feels that the autonomy of their liver cells is an affront to their dignity.

And yet we assume, without much examination, that the neurons in our brain are different. That while every other cell in the body operates according to the laws of biology without our oversight, the firing of neurons somehow involves a special ingredient called us, something that stands outside the physical system and steers it. When you consider how many neurons you have (roughly 86 billion), how many connections between them (estimated at 100 trillion), and how stochastically and rapidly they fire in patterns too complex for any computer yet built to fully simulate, the assumption starts to look less like an insight and more like a habit. A comfortable story we tell ourselves about a process we cannot actually see.

Why would conscious experience be the one exception to the biological rules that govern everything else? The honest answer is that it probably is not. And once you genuinely accept this, something interesting happens. You stop treating your own mind as a courtroom where you are both the defendant and the judge. You stop holding yourself to a standard of perfect rational control over a system that was never designed to be perfectly rationally controlled. You become, in a word, gentler. With yourself first, and then with everyone else.

You may have just noticed your shoulders drop slightly. That was not an accident.

Compassion, forgiveness, and self-acceptance are not just pleasant moral postures. They are measurably associated with improved wellbeing, lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, better cardiovascular outcomes, and stronger immune function.1 Understanding that people, including yourself, are doing the best they can with the inputs they were given is not a soft idea. It is a health intervention.

Now I want to raise something that may seem, at first glance, to directly contradict everything I have just said. It is called locus of control, and it is one of the most robust predictors of health and wellbeing in the psychological literature.

The concept was developed by psychologist Julian Rotter in the 1960s.2 Simply put, people with an internal locus of control believe that their outcomes are largely determined by their own actions and choices. People with an external locus of control believe that what happens to them is mostly determined by luck, fate, or forces outside themselves. Decades of research have shown, consistently, that people with a more internal locus of control exercise more, eat better, seek medical care earlier, manage stress more effectively, and report greater life satisfaction.3

You might reasonably ask: if free will is an illusion, should we not all have an external locus of control? If nothing is truly up to us, is the internal believer not just wrong?

This is the question I want to sit with you for a moment, because I think it contains something important.

The belief that your actions shape your outcomes is itself a cause. It changes your behaviour. And changed behaviour produces different outcomes. The belief does not need to be philosophically watertight to be practically true. A person who believes they can influence their health does influence their health, more than a person who does not. The internal locus of control is not a metaphysical claim about the ultimate nature of causation. It is a posture toward life that, when adopted, changes what your life produces.

You can hold both things at once. The universe may be deterministic all the way down. And the belief that your choices matter may be one of the most important inputs you can feed into that deterministic system. These are not contradictions. They are the same truth, seen from different distances.

I want to stop here and name the objection I can already hear forming.

If I have no free will, why should I bother trying? If this book is telling me I am not truly in control, why would I take control of my life? Are you not arguing against yourself?

It is a fair and sharp objection. And the answer is one of the more useful ideas in this entire book.

The absence of free will and the value of an internal locus of control are not contradictions. They operate in completely different directions. Free will's absence is most useful when you point it outward and backward. Outward, toward other people: the driver, the boss, the difficult colleague, all of them shaped by forces they did not choose. Backward, toward yourself: the decisions you regret, the habits you have not managed to break, the version of you that keeps falling short of the version you want to be. In those directions, releasing the illusion of free will is an act of liberation. It dissolves resentment. It quiets the inner critic. It is, as I said earlier, a genuine health intervention.

But locus of control points inward and forward. Not toward the past or toward others, but toward your own next action, the shape of tomorrow. And here the question of ultimate causation becomes almost irrelevant. Because in a deterministic universe, your actions are causes. Real causes, with real effects. The person who believes their behaviour shapes their outcomes will behave differently than the person who does not. Both are fully determined. But they are determined toward different destinations.

Consider a tornado. You are driving toward it, and at some point something in your brain, your eyes processing the shape of it, your nervous system registering the threat, your accumulated experience of what tornados mean, produces a response: the car turns around. You drive the other way.

Now imagine you are also watching this from a hot air balloon drifting overhead. You are both people simultaneously: the driver below, and the observer above. From the balloon, you can see the tornado, the car, the turn, the escape — all of it unfolding through the deterministic physics of that moment. The tornado formed through atmospheric conditions outside anyone's reach. The car turned through a cascade of neural events that began long before the driver was consciously aware of deciding anything. From up here, none of it was controlled. It simply happened, exactly as it was always going to.

And yet the car is driving away from the tornado. The turning happened. It had consequences. The person inside is going to be fine.

This is the answer to the person who says: if I have no free will, why would I even try? Because the trying is part of the physics. The turning of the car is real regardless of whether the balloon observer willed it. You are always both people at once. You are the deterministic system observed from above, and you are the driver who must still take the wheel. These are not contradictions. They are the same truth from two altitudes.

And this is precisely where locus of control belongs in this picture. The driver who turns the car has an internal locus of control. They are oriented toward the belief that their actions have consequences, that the direction they drive matters. That belief was itself a prior input, shaped by everything that came before this moment. The driver with an external locus of control sits still. Waits. Concludes that the tornado will do what it will do regardless. Neither driver chose their locus of control in any deep sense. But they are headed in very different directions.

Here is the closing loop: locus of control is itself something that can shift. The inputs you are exposed to, the arguments you encounter, the understanding you build — these things can move it. Not through an act of pure will, but through exactly the deterministic cause-and-effect the whole chapter describes. You are reading this right now. That is already an input. The balloon observer above you can see it happening. The driver below is already, however slightly, adjusting course.

You do not need free will for any of this to be true. You just need to be the kind of system whose beliefs shape its outputs. Which, as it happens, is exactly what a human being is.

And here is perhaps the deepest point: in a deterministic universe, doing nothing is also a cause. Passivity is not neutrality. If you read this argument and conclude that because free will is absent you need not try, that conclusion will produce effects just as surely as any other. You cannot opt out of causation. The only question is whether you are a cause that moves your life toward happiness or away from it.

So do not let the philosophy become an excuse for stillness. Let it become an excuse for compassion toward others and yourself, and then, gently, get to work.

There is a word for this, for the particular quality of ease that comes from releasing a grip you were never supposed to have. It is the feeling of forgiving someone not because they deserved it but because carrying the weight was hurting you. It is the feeling of letting yourself off the hook for a version of events that was never entirely in your hands. It is, in the most literal sense, easeful. Not passive. Not resigned. Just no longer fighting a reality that was always going to be exactly what it is.

That is what this whole project is about. Not the absence of effort, but the absence of unnecessary friction. Health, happiness, a life well-lived — none of these require the white-knuckled pursuit we so often bring to them. They require understanding. And understanding, it turns out, is the most effortless thing in the world once you stop defending the wrong idea.

Which brings me to the Plinko machine.

Picture one clearly in your mind: the pegged board, the ball dropping from the top, bouncing left and right in a path that looks almost random but is in fact entirely determined by physics. Now colour half the pegs yellow, for genes, and half green, for environment. The yellow ones capture what you were born with: temperament, predisposition, the body you arrived in. The green ones capture everything that came after: your childhood, your culture, your accumulated experience. The ball is you. The path it takes is your life.

Happiness is not waiting in a slot at the bottom. It is not a destination the ball lands in if everything goes right. It lives in the path itself, in the quality of the journey between the pegs, in whether the route your ball takes is rich, connected, and directed toward something worth going toward.

The yellow pegs, your genes, cannot be moved. They were set before you arrived and they will shape your path whether you acknowledge them or not. But here is what nobody tells you: the green ones are not fixed. The environmental pegs can be moved. Not by pure will, not by declaration, but by the inputs your life collides with. A conversation. A book. A walk that becomes a habit. A community that changes how you see yourself. Think of each green peg as something that can be hammered further into position, or left where it stands. Every chapter that follows is, in that sense, a hammer and peg.

This book is one of those inputs. You did not choose to encounter it in any deep sense. Perhaps someone recommended it. Perhaps you stumbled across it. Perhaps some sequence of events you could not have predicted led you here. But you are here. And the fact that you are already reading means the ball has already grazed a new peg. Something is already, however slightly, different.

That is not nothing. In a deterministic universe, every cause matters, because every cause has an effect. The goal of this book is not to give you free will. It is to be a peg worth bouncing off. To put in front of you the things that the best available evidence tells us actually move people toward happiness, so that your life, whatever its trajectory was before you opened this page, runs a richer path through the board.

Happiness, after all, is less a destination than a direction. And the direction starts here, with the next chapter, whenever you are ready.