“Intuition is the source for the compassionate and sustainable stewardship we now need.”
— Hrund Gunnsteinsdóttir, author
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Resilience
If you can pronounce Hrund Gunnsteinsdóttir, then you should listen to her TED talk on resilience (Gunnsteinsdóttir 2024). I listened to the first minute, which was enough to remind me that to be resilient you need to have the power to decide.
I have been thinking about free will. It is an annoying question that keeps popping up. It interrupts my thinking in the way the question of how much money I’m making interrupts me when I’m doing what I think is interesting.
I find theoretical physics interesting, but it’s not obviously important in our lives. Yet, physics is connected to the question of free will. It rests on the question of whether or not we live in a mechanical universe.
The question is this: in building environments where our roles are clear, have we made ourselves into machines? In a society where all operates according to plan, do we need to make decisions?
This is a question that Donald Trump has placed in front of us as we proceeded half asleep into the future. We find our progress blocked by a burning bridge that poses the question, “Are you responsible for this?”
Do Populations Think?
Underlying this is whether or not populations think. Do populations have free will? That interesting question is partly determined by whether or not individuals have free will. This personal question is pertinent to our mental health.
On an individual level, free will is linked to resilience because both operate in the same realm. In exercising your free will you confront uncertainty, and maintaining free will under uncertain conditions requires resilience. That is, you cannot exercise free will unless you’re able to return to what you’ve decided. Free will is the object; resilience is the mechanism.
The value in this comparison lies in recognizing they’re connected by commitment. Free will amounts to nothing if you can’t make something happen. What difference would having free will make if, like a pinball, you changed direction when you hit the next obstacle. If you cannot maintain the direction you’ve chosen, you’re a slave to circumstance.
The Path of Least Resistance
If you really have free will, then you will encounter obstacles. If you don’t encounter obstacles, then you’re following a path of no resistance. And if you’re following such a path, then have you really made any choice at all? Resilience demonstrates you are not doing what circumstances dictate and that you’re not following someone else’s plan.
If you listen to Robert Sapolsky, a primatologist, in a YouTube video on the absence of free will (Sapolsky 2024)—I can endure only the first 5 minutes—then you’ll probably agree that free will is a question of degree. Sapolsky’s point is that different situations allow different degrees of autonomy.
We’ll have different choices depending on the habits we’ve developed. We’re always constrained in some regard. The notion of complete freedom can only mean complete chaos. Sapolsky would agree with this.
There are always constraining forces and our “freedom” is a choice between constraints. Our choices are determined by our character but the concept of complete free will, as in some bolt of autonomy from the 5th dimension, is nonsense.
Responsibility
Even if we’re not fundamentally free, we are responsible for some things that happen. That is, if it weren’t for us some things wouldn’t happen. You could say we are just witless agents driven by combined circumstances—a theory I support—and those who programmed us have escaped.
It may not be fair to shoot the messenger, but if you keep shooting the messengers you work your way up the chain of command. Eventually, you find yourself confronting the instigator. This works with ideas too: if you keep slaying specious reasoning you eventually arrive at the fundamental problem.
There is a cost to this combat. Messengers don’t arrive from nowhere, they’re in our lives because we invited them. Shooting the messenger has consequences, and if the messages are personal so are the consequences.
Is accepting a bad message a viable alternative? The obvious answer is that you choose your battles. This is the same as saying that you exercise free will with discretion. Your sense of discretion, which describes your personal cost benefit analysis, is based on your commitment and resilience.
My conclusion is that you have as much free will as you are committed to your decisions and have the resilience required to maintain them.
Betrayal and Defeat
Consider those people who you know who lack commitment. Their lack could either be due to a lack of free will or a lack of resilience. Either they cannot see deeply into their circumstances, or they don’t have a deep enough rudder to prevail against circumstantial headwinds.
The judgments you place on others are not useful unless you apply them to yourself. Other people offer experiments we can learn from, but your decisions are the only ones for which you can exercise free will.
To claim free will, you must have commitment and resilience in equal measure. But we can go one step further. We can forget free will. We can focus entirely on commitment and resilience.
Failing commitment you betray. Maintaining commitment does not ensure success, but it ensures learning. You will always be better off by honoring your commitments and always worse for failing them.
Lacking resilience you are defeated. Being resilient also does not ensure success, but it ensures survival. Defeat should never be your choice because it means depression and pointlessness. With resilience you can change course, find new meaning, and create new opportunities. Making positive things happen in a world of uncertain choices requires resilience.
The question of free will is of fundamental importance in physics but it is personally pointless. No conscious being can avoid exercising free will. The alternative is pointlessness and depression. I think about this every time an insect flies in the house. I urge them to reconsider.
Personal Growth
The problem of personal growth centers on commitment and resilience. These two are connected, in some sense they are the same thing. Being committed and resilient are not sufficient, but they are necessary.
Personal growth is a contradiction in terms. You are mentally healthy only to the extent that you are seeing new things and thinking new thoughts. A person who stops encountering novelty in the world does not just stop growing, they mentally decay.
All the people I’ve known who lacked commitment and resilience make uncertain progress. They may appear well established, but they have lost direction. They will fulfill their potential only by luck or not at all. In some cases, they may fall into defeat and depression. Thirty percent of the elderly become depressed in this culture (Hu et al. 2022).
It’s easy to talk about free will because it’s insubstantial. Commitment and resilience are not so trivial. If you consider these qualities in yourself you will hear all manner of explanations and excuses. They are the messengers of your defeat. Shoot them.
If you’d like to find greater commitment and resilience, you can schedule a free call and I’ll tell you where you’ll find them.
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