In September 2022, I published an initial post about how I live with the lottery of birth and lack of free will.
It's now August 2023, so I thought it would be fun to revisit the first post and see what still resonates and what's new. Enjoy!
Let's set the tone with one of the most beautiful paragraphs I've ever read:
"Free will scepticism is an antidote to that bleak individualist philosophy which holds that a person’s accomplishments truly belong to them alone – and that you’ve therefore only yourself to blame if you fail. It’s a reminder that accidents of birth might affect the trajectories of our lives far more comprehensively than we realise, dictating not only the socioeconomic position into which we’re born, but also our personalities and experiences as a whole: our talents and our weaknesses, our capacity for joy, and our ability to overcome tendencies toward violence, laziness or despair, and the paths we end up travelling. There is a deep sense of human fellowship in this picture of reality – in the idea that, in our utter exposure to forces beyond our control, we might all be in the same boat, clinging on for our lives, adrift on the storm-tossed ocean of luck." — Oliver Burkeman
