You have to choose, and you have to die.

Author's Note

In a world of increasing complexity, we find ourselves ill-equipped to handle countless choices. Decision fatigue and stress often replace the self-empowerment and freedom of choice promised by current cultural paradigms. As a result, we’re often left with the fear of missing out rather than the gratefulness and liberty that come from deciding on and exploring our individual path in life.

Still, certain choices seem obvious to us, and we make them effortlessly. Some of us would never consider changing what political party to support, while others won’t stop reevaluating. Some of us know we have chosen the right job, partner and life for ourselves, while many keep questioning their choices repeatedly. Those of us in doubt may lack either information or principles to guide our choices in specific areas of our life.

Today, though, there is seldom a shortage of information. But an incoherent collection of data points without the right structure or meaning leaves us more confused than informed. We are confronted with information about new jobs, partners, and lifestyle choices at an ever-increasing rate. If we stand grounded in core principles aligned with what we believe to be true, we can more easily determine if new information is relevant to us and sort accordingly.

If our principle and belief focus on knowledge that relates to what we will be able to influence, then spending hours on world politics can be deprioritized. If we lack the models of how to sort and use new information, more of it will not help but will instead overwhelm us. Being fed more world problems without the agency or means to help will benefit neither the world nor ourselves.

This book presents a holistic approach to thinking about conscious choice—from the very abstract to the specific application of decision models. The sections that follow lay out ten models for choice that may raise our awareness, strengthen our discernment, and guide our future direction in life.

The short format is tailored by and for the impatient reader. At the same time, each concept is presented with enough room for reading between the lines to contemplate, evaluate, and internalize. Regardless of what we individually conclude to be our true north, guiding our decisions, we all have been given a tremendous freedom and power, hidden mainly behind our own perception of reality.

We happened to have materialized at a remarkable place and time, where circumstances have provided us excess far beyond pure survival as well as a conscious mind to decide what to do with these resources. Make them count.

Free will as a function of consciousness.

Did we consciously choose to look for a partner, work on our career, and pick what to wear? Or were we simply prompted by our DNA, society’s expectations, and companies’ advertisements? The question of free will is as old as consciousness itself. Still, this question has gained new relevance given the arrival of powerful, self-learning, marketing algorithms. Machine learning exemplifies how human incentives and decision-making can be reverse engineered, modeled, and exploited to control our choices. While the information in our environment has always impacted our decisions, the tools to tailor that information for commercial or political purposes have grown exponentially more sophisticated. This reality prompts us to revisit the question of whether free will exists at all. If it does, how might we regain control of our lives and our choices?
___
‍
The influences in our lives range from countless political groups to family and friends—all of which can be overwhelming. But the concept of determinism goes even farther. If we drop a book mid-air, it seems predetermined that it will fall to the floor. This is an indisputable fact. A certain object or force will behave predictably based on fundamental laws of nature. If everything in the universe is bound to follow a predictable course of events, then arguably, so are we. Whether our choices are predetermined in the past, fated in the future, or both, is a question for quantum physics, religion, or our existential conviction.

As predictably as a book is drawn to earth, physical laws determine how subatomic particles influence atoms that connect neurons in our brains. Impulses prompt actions—actions that shape relationships, societies, and cultures—a very complex but predictable chain of events. If the entire chain of events stems from the predictable laws of nature, where does free will enter the system? This reasoning becomes more intuitively comprehensible when adopting a broader perspective of ourselves in relation to time and society as a larger system. 
‍
Start with a look back at our past, and we realize how every decision created our present self and guides our future. Particles and neurons aside, we can likely point to real events in our past that have impacted how our life turned out later. We might ask ourselves, where would we be and who would we be if we grew up in a different family, society, or country? More importantly, given our DNA, upbringing, and all that we encountered in life, could we ever have ended up any other way than how we did? If we choose to accept determinism as fact, the answer is no. 
‍
Moving out from the individual perspective to the societal view, determinism becomes easier to grasp, and the implications are more readily applied. A society founded on determinism would likely not attribute wrongdoing as a personal choice to be punished. Rather, it would focus on building a community that offered each individual a safe and nurturing path through life. If done right, such a community would incentivize individuals to make their individual choices based on a will to contribute to the society that supported them instead of building on fear and the accumulation of personal power. 

The question of how we build that society and what we optimize for as a community is age-old, but with current marketing algorithms and political polarization, the stakes are high. On the societal level, accepting determinism as a construct may help us become less critical of opposing views. Realizing that each belief and action results from an endless chain of events can help us focus less on the contradicting view and more on the underlying cause. We may use this insight to add a little compassion and curious inquiry into the opposing views held by others. After all, it may give us a hint of the particular path in life taken by the person in front of us.

For individuals, thinking about the possibility that our perceived “choices” are, in fact, predetermined can be unintuitive and uncomfortable, mainly because we are used to defining ourselves by our agency and the decisions we make. But free choice is real and can coexist besides determinism. It’s a matter of perspective, one that we should apply carefully. 

Looking at different cities, anywhere in the world, we are bound to find striking similarities between them. Power hierarchies, professions, and infrastructure—while not identical—look much alike, from one city to another. It seems when all the individually free choices are aggregated as a whole, cities end up very similarly organized all around the world, as though our choices are predetermined. On the other hand, citizens will likely point to a number of reasons that lead them to make calculated conscious considerations. And indeed, there is much variance within every culture. In particular, there will often be a small fraction of progressive individuals seemingly aware of the patch dependence that leads us to replicate the same patterns in every city. The good and the bad alike. This awareness can enable us as individuals and society to look beyond deterministic influences such as egocentric incentives, myopic use of natural resources, and inequal allocation of goods.   

The cultural and intellectual maturity of society as a whole is deeply intertwined with the maturity of its single individuals. Each person is a building block, and together, people make society what it is. That’s because society is an aggregate of its individuals, who are in turn influenced by society as a whole. This is how collective maturity can be linked—even if not linearly—to the maturity of single individuals.

As children, we get away with screaming aloud, not consciously aware but acting on predetermined DNA programming to survive. As we get older, the same behavior is no longer accepted as our conscious mind provides us new tools to express ourselves and higher awareness about our impact on others. While experience through life will narrow our creativity through trial and error, a more self-aware mind will expand our ability to override deep-founded biological programming. Screaming is no longer the only response to unfulfilled needs. We’ve gained a more considerable degree of free will and, with that, an implicit responsibility to use it compassionately towards ourselves and others. 
Often, we look back at our youth, realizing how much we had to learn still. Less often, we imagine our future selves, looking back at where we stand today. The child matures and realizes that the instinctive screams as a response to fear are replaced by free choice. Maturity doesn’t have to stop there but can continue to reveal more of our automated triggers and reactions that we may want to control intentionally. Similarly, we may look back at our society, noticing with discomfort how we acted out towards people long ago based on race, gender, and beliefs. How will future generations look back at us if we never grew up to seriously challenge the current path at odds with animal life, ecosystem, and sustainable life? 

Determinism and free will are both here in a superposition, all for our taking. If we distance ourselves from our egos and individualistic perspective, we can become consciously aware of the path dependence created through nature, society, and neurological pathways. Through practicing being intentionally grounded in the present, we may more clearly see the deterministic link between past and future. Not noticing the influences of the past onto our society and individual path means we’re, perhaps happily unaware, stuck on a predetermined ride for us to follow. When we start to notice what dictates our direction, we’re instantly given a choice to continue down that road or decide differently out of a higher level of consciousness. Freedom is in itself a choice.