Late Night Fiction One man’s adventures through life

Fate

There are a few words in the English language that are used to over-simplify one huge idea when there is a lot more to it. One of these words that many people are probably familiar with is love. Some that might not be so obviously are fate and luck. But I'll get to luck another day.

Like all of these "one word-ers," you might believe in them, or you might not. Another characteristic that they all seem to share is their inability to be unquestionably proved or disproved.

Our topic today, fate, can't really be proved or disproved because no one knows for sure what will happen in the future, or what would've happened if you had made a different choice (or what choice you should make ahead of time, for that matter). Now we sometimes like to think we know that "we should've done this" or "seen this coming." The psychology-types call this hindsight-bias. But there is a big difference between what we think we know about what would've happened and what actually would've happened.

I try not to directly state my beliefs here but I will this time. I believe we all have a fate, but it needs to be better defined. I believe we have a whole sequence of actions and decisions that we will make in our lifetime, based on our environmental factors and state of mind at the time of those decisions, when they happen in the future. In other words, you have complete free-will; but the decisions you make because of your free will have already been made in the timeline of your life. Which goes to say, it is not "fate" in the way your family, or society, or others see it. Your fate is strictly created in your own mind, based on the environmental factors around you (friends, family, society, etc.) when you make any decision. The succession of all these decisions you will make in life are stacked up in the even bigger timeline that is time itself. But if you were to draw a picture of your life based on fate, it would be a crooked, zig-zagging line, changing direction at every decision (as opposed to a straight, unchanging line). The common misconception seems to be that we don't make our own decisions in our life. When, in fact, we make every decision based on all the factors in our own head at the time. And that is what determines where our life leads-- our "fate."

Next week I'll go a little more in-depth on this topic in Part 2.