How can I know, like really know, if what I choose to think or do comes from a place of willingness?

Is all I do determined, like predetermined, because I am only a fragment, nay a product, in the cause for what has happened to me and what will?

When reflecting on the origin of ‘choice’, I can’t help but think that “it” has already been decided by itself; every time I singularly acknowledge that I am doing what I am doing thinking I am only reacting to a situation in the ways I know how to do it because of who I’ve come to be - I am who I am because it is in the nature of surviving that we must all answer to queries and parameters set in front of us in order to stay alive and move on as creatures, therefore are absolutely and constantly molded by the result of those said fortuitous challenges -  I advert to “it” as a form of determinism, as an un-unprovable dogma of predestination based upon my sole experiential past; the choice cannot be other than what it is because all ascended to that precise moment where no other solution to the problematic was possible because there is simply no other me. I then ponder that the next choice will also inscribe itself, by itself, unto me, using my unconscious self empirical journey to fuel the forever and inevitable choices to be made. 

If that’s the case, am I spectating my own life?

Did I only make the first choice, the one that called for all future ones, and then hit the bench forever? 

I know it is not about destiny. That it is about reactiveness.

I’ve come to be who I am because of everything that chronologically unfolded on the path that is my life since the day I was born.

That I’ve only been responding to emotions arising, to events taking place, to ideas popping in my head.

And that I reason the way I do because of the sum of it all. 

But what do I really control? 

How can I truly establish grounds for decision-making?

Evolution rose to a time where consciousness was imparted to us, humans, as a tool to subsist as a species.

At some point, we were pushed to comprehend certain accidental deployments, like two rocks making fire;

Or at least we managed to understand them, and we became stronger and wiser.

We had to be able to make sense of factual hazardous happenings: our mind grew in the path of reason.

It led us to create other tools, based upon our first contingent discoveries. 

And here we are.

Today’s notion of inventions comes from our intent to understand what is already in place, and from our intrinsic instinct for development, expansion, and improvement. We don’t just choose to create something out of thin air. We seek, in both subliminal and conscious ways, to participate in the pursuit of a motive we wish to ameliorate, one that was already there, and one that will evolve with those reciprocating to it. We don’t choose to get to the point where we have an epiphany, or don’t intentionally pick the field in which we desire to investigate further with the aim to adduce something novel to it. It just so happens that we are the result of the ongoing equation that is our life, and that the actions we undertake are the procession of the addition of all the encounters we’ve made since day one; all of which are paralleling the progression of our individual constructed moral compass and sense of purpose that are needed to activate our mind and body. 

But again, we don’t really choose our purposes.

We don’t actually decide what we consider right or wrong, good or bad.

We accumulate and package knowledge, and then a choice is given to us as to who we feel we are. 

And we identify and fit a certain profile of a certain type of individual in society. 

And it becomes crucial in our understanding of ourselves as conscious entities.

And we need those things to go on and make sense of our lives.

In reality, it’s all just a state of living through time and space with that ability to look upon ourselves in an omniscient way.

But it is rather calming to think my actions and thoughts are being brought up by a force that only I envision on a second by second basis.

Or else what?

Constant chaos in doubting my self-input within my own life?

Not sure I want that.

I don’t know that I don’t have a choice, but I choose not to think that way.

Catch the irony? 

Or maybe I need to accept that I am all nerves in a physical and chemical container.

That I am a system that needs food and purposes - even though I know I don’t actually choose to be hungry and never asked to desire purposes as life fulfillment goals for my mind.

That I am at the mercy of foreordination based on my birth location.

That I am the prognostic of a life that manufactures me as time occurs to be random events placed in an unorderly order.

Hell, why not. 

It might be a little esoteric, but I have no counter-argument.

To think I am just a puppet merely doing the things I am conducted to do is yet terrifying but somewhat plausible. 

As all is in constant motion, so is our existential quest for meaning within the falsehood paradigm that is freewill.

Where we stagnate, we die. It is only natural.

But choice gives us a sense of control, that put us at ease.

One thing is for sure, I can’t run away from the fact that I am a sensible being: this cannot be argued otherwise; I simply feel what I feel when I feel it.

Anyway,

Let’s choose not to think about it.