Aspiration and Fatalism

As saturated as the topic of you can/can’t be anything you want to be is, I thought I’d add a few of my own thoughts. I was tempted to use the word ‘determinism’ in the title but fatalism lines up more with my philosophy. Over and over throughout our schooling and potentially beyond, we are told we can be anything we want. No aspiration is too far, the sky is the limit. Most people do not believe this even some of the teachers and mentors who expound this philosophy do not believe it.

What we become, funnily, is outside our control. Free will is an illusion. Everything is predetermined. We can predict things within limited ranges but there is always uncertainty. Unexpected things always happen. By this I mean that, you can never have enough data. This links with chaos theory and the butterfly effect.

What kind of people we become is a combination of genetics (that we have no control over) and environment (which we still don’t have any control over). You may think it’s possible to put yourself in better situations through planning and good decisions. However, where did these decisions originate from? The wiring of your brain, the fact that your prefrontal cortex is well developed and more so than someone less successful than you which gave you the capacity to make longer term plans and sensible decisions – outside your control.

What happens in the future is outside our control. Though we might feel we have a way of imposing our will on the journey we make, there is only the journey since free will is an illusion.

Overall, we can be fortunate or unfortunate. We can have the luxury of a sense of high control if we have fortunate circumstances. A good upbringing and education, high intelligence, good looks, respect from others – in part deriving from those traits and more.

While we cannot alter our path from where it is going we can cultivate a stoic mindset (not freely). Acknowledging what is out of our control and accepting whatever comes our way, makes us stronger. On another level it can make is more humble, after all, our achievements are not down to us but to our fortune.