From the time you’re born, you’re engaged in active self-creation. You teach yourself to crawl, then to walk, then to speak. You explore your environment, seeking out things that are interesting and rewarding. You test reality to distinguish what’s firm and absolute from what’s in flux and open to your will. You push the plate off your high chair and it crashes to the ground. Mommy puts it back and you knock it off. Does it fall again or not? Slowly, you adapt yourself to your environment, devising strategies for getting what you want and avoiding what you don’t want.
If you are fortunate, this process of growth and maturity is aided by adults. They encourage you to explore. They respect your independence and nurture your desire for an increasing understanding of the world and mastery over the world. They fill your environment with potential values and introduce you to new challenges and adventures. When they see that you’re bored with the toy kitchen set, they bring you into a real kitchen so you can learn to cook. When they see that you’re bored with picture books, they introduce you to chapter books. They don’t order you about but help you grasp the long-range consequences of your actions. Not “take a bath because I say so,” but “if you bathe, you’ll feel fresh and clean.” You learn to project the longer-range consequences of your actions and to take responsibility for your choices.
Time passes and your sense of independence and autonomy increases. You start thinking at greater and greater levels of abstraction. You start projecting goals that reach further and further into the future. You’re no longer making discrete choices about what to eat or what sports to play. You’re taking on weighty decisions about what kind of person you want to become and what kind of life you want to lead.
All too often, this process of growth and maturity is not aided but impeded by adults. Sometimes they ignore and neglect you—not necessarily to the point of abuse, but they deprive you of the love, acceptance, and encouragement that provide a solid foundation for independent exploration of the world. In other cases, adults actively discourage your autonomy. They demand obedience. You retain your sovereignty, but your desire for self-direction is no longer an untempered source of joy and pride, but a source of pain and conflict. Your desire to understand, experiment, and enjoy life opens you up to threats, disapproval, punishment, and even violence. In the name of peace and safety, you can kill your soul before it is fully born. You can surrender your autonomy and come to fear it, clinging to the security of obedience. Or you can plow ahead, telling yourself that the adults around you are wrong and that, someday, you will be in charge of your own life.
Whatever your circumstances, whatever path you choose, the fact that you are self-made is an ineradicable part of human nature. You are not clay that can be molded (though you can allow yourself to be molded if you choose to surrender your mind). You are free and sovereign. You can be imprisoned, enslaved, or destroyed, but you cannot be controlled. Not without your consent.
And yet it does not always seem like you are in control of your life. You can feel trapped by your circumstances, blindsided by external events, suffocated by your boss or partner or children, overburdened by the demands of life.
To say that human beings have free will leaves unanswered one crucial question: What does it mean to control your life in a world where so much is outside of your control? If, psychologically, human agency consists of the ability to control your mind, what does it consist of existentially?
The first thing to say is: a lot of things are outside of your control. You can’t control the nature of nature. You can’t wish away the law of gravity, you can’t wish away the fact that life is finite, you can’t wish away the fact that you must exert effort to get what you want and that success is never guaranteed. These facts are not subject to your control—they are the conditions under which you exercise your control. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed,” Bacon said. Human capability is not the power to wish facts into or out of existence—it is the power to understand what exists and rearrange what exists to achieve your purposes.
Take COVID-19. That disease was a fact—not something we could wish out of existence. Some people did try to wish it out of existence, arguing in defiance of facts that it was not a serious threat, trivializing a rising body count, mocking anyone who took sensible precautions to avoid getting sick. Others accepted the fact of COVID-19—most especially the scientists who worked to understand its nature. They used that knowledge to engineer the vaccines and treatments that helped end the pandemic. They obeyed the facts of reality—and were able to command nature on a grand scale.
Human choice is a limited power but an awesome power. We cannot wish disease out of existence—but we can create vaccines. We cannot will ourselves to fly—but we can create airplanes. We cannot pray our way to nourishment—but we can create farms, factories, and grocery stores.
Just as the nature of nature is outside of your control, so are the choices of other people. You cannot make someone think what you think or want what you want. You cannot will someone to love you or to give you a job. But here, too, you are not powerless. You have the tool of persuasion. You have the power to make yourself worthy of love or worthy of employment. And, if you cannot persuade a potential lover or employer, you have the power to go your own way and explore new romantic or career opportunities.
The Serenity Prayer got it right: life requires serenely accepting what you cannot change, courageously changing what you can, and acquiring the wisdom to know the difference. That is what it means to take control of your life.
Too many people don’t take control of their lives. They cheat themselves by not trying to control what they can. Think of the people who resign themselves to flaws in their character with the excuse, “That’s just the way I am.” Think of the people who resign themselves to poverty because “I wasn’t born rich.” Think of the people who go to school because “I have to” or who stay in a loveless marriage because “I have to” or who stay in a joyless job because “I have to” or who go to church because “I have to.” Think of anyone who refuses to question tradition, or convention, or what their parents want, or what some authority says, and blames others for their problems.
As a human being, there’s nothing you have to do except obey (or futilely rebel against) reality. Everything else is a choice. This fact is crucial to keep in mind because it will allow you to distinguish between duties—suffering you endure because you think you’re supposed to—and values, which always require effort, and which often require struggle, frustration, and hardship. There are no duties in life. There are no unchosen obligations. The only time you should accept the unpleasant is when it’s necessary to get what you want. And by the same token, if you surrender what you want because you’re not willing to pay the price to get it, then you’re selling out your life—and you have no excuse. The only thing stopping you is you.
There’s one partial exception here: when others try to impose duties on you by the use of physical force. Here the issue is simple. Whereas you should never rebel against reality, you must rebel against coercion in whatever form is open to you. That may mean advocating freedom and voting for candidates who support freedom. It may mean fleeing a dictatorship or taking up arms against it. In the worst case, rebellion may mean reminding yourself, as you’re trapped inside a tyrant’s prison, that your punishment is unjust and that you deserve to be free.
The tragedy is how many people who are free rob themselves of happiness by refusing to control what they can. They don’t engage their minds, they don’t choose goals, they don’t work to achieve them, and so they surrender control over their lives. They tell themselves that success comes from good luck and that they are the helpless victim of bad luck. Such people do become deterministic puppets whose life course is the product of chance. But they made themselves into puppets. They could have been human beings.
The reality is that free will doesn’t give you total control over your life—it gives you fundamental control. It gives you the power to set long-range goals, accumulate knowledge relevant to your goals, and move purposefully toward your goals, even in the face of obstacles. You can try to predict and prepare for chance events. When you encounter good luck, you can act to capitalize on it. When you encounter bad luck, you can search for another route to your goal, sometimes even turning negatives into positives. Free will is your ongoing ability to set (and change) your life course, and to continually engage in learning so you can develop new and better strategies for moving from where you are to where you want to be.
For example, when I started working as a freelance writer, I had no illusions that my success was under my total control. I couldn’t control the economy, I couldn’t control whether other people would pay me for my services, I couldn’t control whether competitors would try to undercut me on price. But I didn’t feel as though I were playing the lottery because I wasn’t. I was able to take an active role in creating the future I wanted.
I was able to reach out to potential clients, and when I received rejections, to mine those for lessons: Was I going after the wrong market? Had I priced my services too high? Had I failed because my sales skills were lousy? And when I did win clients, I was in control of how I performed, and by meeting and surpassing their expectations I could ask for referrals and further expand my client base. That’s what agency looks like.
The circumstances you find yourself in and the chance events that come your way don’t control you—they provide a context for your choices. They present you with challenges and opportunities, and it’s your choices that determine whether you overcome your challenges and whether you capitalize on your opportunities.
You control your life, and if you want to make the most of that life, you have one job: to take charge. To focus, to think, to open your eyes. That is the path to happiness.