 Got a comment from Rasa on the topic of free will pointing out that this concept of free will can be misused, misapplied to suggest that basically everything in our lives is our choice. We choose to be who we are and so whatever situation we're in anybody looking at that can just look back and say oh here you must have had these certain good or bad choices to get you to the place where you are now and in some cases it can even be taken to the extreme of even beyond this lifetime in some previous lifetime you made choices that led to the situation that you were born in. But clearly the idea that we choose everything in our lives is taking this much too far. Free will, the ability to make free choices. I believe that every conscious being has the ability to make choices, but that doesn't mean that we can choose everything about our situation far from it. Because in our actions we are severely constrained by everything else that's going on. We live within a certain situation. We're born into a certain situation at a certain time and place. We have experiences that form us in our early years before we have the ability to make conscious choices and then even at the adult stage we are still already living in the mold and the the manner that we have been trained in and trained ourselves in and we are affected by all the things going on around us. So the idea of assigning everything to individual choices is certainly a mistake and it's especially bad when it's applied to other people to look at somebody in a certain situation and just sort of reverse engineer that you know work back and say, oh they must have made this and this a choice. It seems to be when it comes to people that are highly successful that they can, we can say, oh they must have made good choices, but then if we look at people that are very unsuccessful, we also can apply this idea of they made bad choices and in both those cases it's missing out on all the other factors and situations that can affect the situation that somebody's in. So the idea of if you see homeless alcoholic and you can say to this person it's okay. I have the solution. It's very simple. You have been choosing to be a homeless alcoholic. So the solution is use your free will to decide not to drink and then use your free will to set wholesome goals for yourself and work earnestly every day towards achieving them and you will be in a happier situation. Of course it would be quite foolish to say that to somebody because it's not simply a matter of deciding to change your situation out of nowhere. Not only are we constrained by the circumstances outside us that we're in, but even more basically, our own ability to use our free will is constrained. We don't have a total ability to simply decide whatever we want and do it. We have varying degrees of control over our own will and over ourselves. Anybody who has an addiction can understand that and even if somebody with no significant addiction still has a limited willpower. We cannot simply make ourselves do anything. There is always a limit and for some of us the limit is a very restrictive limit in that we cannot either you could say we don't know how, we don't have the training, the practice, the discipline, the habit to be able to apply our will in an organized way. Seems like the automatic state of and the default state is to have a disorganized will to not have a clearly organized decision making and enacting ability. We kind of go from situation to situation, make a lot of unconscious choices, make a lot of unconscious actions, automatic behavior, and we don't just have this sort of like strategic master control view that, oh, I can pick this about my life. I can pick this about my life. We can never get that perfectly and it seems like the default state is to be nowhere near that. We're just sort of in this chaotic mix of events and just making a lot of little decisions here and there. So the commenter Rasa uses the example of a bug climbing up a tree that the tree, and this is a giant tree with millions of branches and billions of leaves. So the bug can, at each juncture as climbing up the tree, can choose which branch to climb onto. So you could say that the bug has complete free will and yet the bug is at the mercy of the tree. And the wind and whatever other factors are going on. So that's a good picture of how free will really is limited in the sense that we don't even know what we're doing. So we can make a free choice, but then we don't really know what the effects of that choice are going to be. And we cannot freely design the end state of our lives and say, well here I want to be this happy, healthy, successful person. So I just have to make this set of correct choices and then I get there because we don't even know. So along with being constrained by all the factors around us, having a limited ability to actually apply our will in an organized way and actually not knowing what the results of the effects of our decisions will ultimately be, these are all major restrictions on our ability to simply choose whatever we want. So we can never simply look at somebody in their resulting state, their current situation and simply assume that they've made a certain set of choices leading up to that point. So the idea of free will, it's almost like at an abstract level that we could, it's like a potential, we could make free choices at this abstract level, but the ability to actually apply that to real life is restricted by so many other factors. The limits in ourselves and also the limits of everything else around us, the situation that we're in, we are after all highly limited beings in a huge universe just like the little bug climbing up on the tree. We're always living in something that is bigger than ourselves. But with all this being said, I still believe that no matter our situation, it is possible to somehow make it better, not necessarily to achieve a certain end state. It's not like saying that any possible end state is possible, that we can achieve absolutely anything no matter what. But I believe that no matter how bad the situation, how restricted our ability to act and even how restricted our ability to control ourselves, there is always the potential to improve our situation. Even if in the most extreme case where we have absolutely no control over our external environment, if we are maybe terminally ill, imprisoned, paralyzed, some sort of extreme state of being externally restricted, we still have the ability to somehow change our state of mind, our inner perspective and our character. So there is always a way, there is always a way to apply our will in one way or another. But the route from a free will potential inside us to what manifests in the world has a lot else going on.