Free Will is an Illusion

Should I have taken surface streets instead of the highway? Why did I eat all those cupcakes? What if I spent that one weekend last year learning a foreign language instead of planting bombs inside all those farmers' mailboxes? All stupid questions, because the people asking them are presuming they had a choice in the first place. This is wrong. You are a passive observer of your own life. You have as little say over your fate as a theater full of screaming black people have over that of the teenage nymphomaniac in the next slasher film you see, and saying otherwise is as pointless as criticizing the ignorance of racists, people who resort to cheap racist stereotypes to make points about their powerlessness to resist doing so, or taking the time to point this out (i.e. what I'm doing now).

As unpopular a sentiment as it might be to anybody who's ever done something they believe to have been clever, or been the victim of an evil act they derive pleasure from hating someone for, it matters as much as their opinion of the words on this page: zero. What is, is, the same way it is whenever anyone does something incredibly stupid - not their fault.

Consider the fact that, since our universe erupted from the super hot, tremendously dense butthole of some parallel universe 14 billion years ago, a 400 quadrillion second long string of events, considered random only by people who have yet to figure out that there's no such thing, has preceded the present, making your sitting there in your little chair picking your nose the culmination of a magnificently intricate and complicated web of gazillions of reactions.

Every particle involved in an event as seemingly chaotic and random as an explosion follows the laws of physics, and will behave accordingly. The inability of your limited brain to predict the outcome such events just because they're highly complicated doesn't make them "random".

Still think you have the ability to quit drinking coffee if you "decide to" and "exercise your will power"? You'll quit if your body just happens to while experiencing the sensations associated with these hallucinations, but the gratitude and pride you attribute to yourself and Steve Pavlina or whatever dopey self help blog you read regularly will be grossly misplaced.

Of course, none of this means you can't root for yourself as long as you remain under the influence of the facts of this article, which probably won't be long anyway, so who cares.