Does Free Will Exist?

Most conversations come with certain expectations depending on who you are talking to and why. The way you chat with someone ringing up your groceries is very different from the way you negotiate a raise with your boss.

Dating apps, though, are a strange exception. Within the same conversation, you can go from “What’s your favorite movie?” to “What’s your attachment style?” or “What are you healing from?”

And yet, after enough time on dating apps, even that unpredictability starts to feel strangely predictable. There is almost a hidden script we follow. Eventually, you get pretty good at answering the usual questions. You start curating your responses and slipping into autopilot.

Then one man on Tinder asked me:

“Do you think free will exists, or is it an illusion?”

For a moment, I wondered if I had somehow traveled back thousands of years and accidentally matched with Socrates. But nay. He was very much a fellow millennial born in the ’80s, rocking Ray-Bans.

Still, the question stopped me.

This year, a lot of life has felt like it was happening “to me.” Other people made choices, changed course, and I found myself responding to circumstances I did not choose. My marriage ended in a way I had not chosen. It felt as though someone else had suddenly rewritten the script of my life.

The strange thing is that losing control of one version of my life gave me more control over the next one. Not the kind of freedom I had asked for, certainly, but freedom nonetheless. I can buy a couch without consulting anyone. Throw away an appliance because I am sick of looking at it. Paint a wall purple without having to worry about whether it complements my partner’s taste.

More importantly, I have been trying to stay true to myself precisely because no matter how unfortunate, circumstances and other people’s actions are outside my control. The one thing I can still influence is how I respond to them. I can ask myself: Who do I want to be in this moment? How do I want to show up?

But if free will does not exist, am I actually choosing any of this?

Then it dawned on me that perhaps I do not care that much.

Maybe our choices are shaped by biology, circumstance, and countless outside influences. But if some mysterious combination of those things is making me believe I am choosing, fine. I hope it keeps steering me toward hope over bitterness, compassion over judgment, vulnerability over defensiveness, and love over hate.

So what if free will is a figment of our imagination?

Human beings have a remarkable ability to believe in things that are not there. We create stories, meaning, gods, monsters, borders, money, entire worlds in our minds, and those beliefs can shape how we live.

Maybe free will works a little like that, too.

I may never know whether my choices are truly mine. But if believing that I have a choice helps me stay true to the person I want to be, then that belief is already doing something real.

And that is a story worth retelling.

Written by SAKURACO