In our philosophy club, we were discussing whether life is guided by free will or by some predetermined plan. The deterministic view is the harder one to live with. If everything is already decided before you even exist, then none of your choices are really yours. Whatever happens was always going to happen. Your past decisions were never truly under your control, and your future decisions will not be either. From that view, choice is only a feeling.
Imagine that you want to become a painter. You study art, practice every day, and build your life around that goal. But if your life is already fixed, and you are "meant" to become a teacher, then all of that effort changes nothing. You were always going to end up in the same place. In that kind of universe, control is mostly an illusion.
I think this view has an obvious appeal. It can be comforting. If there is a script behind everything, then failure becomes easier to carry. If everything is planned, then nothing is ever fully your fault. Determinism can turn into a very elegant way of escaping responsibility.
But when I look at my own past, that explanation starts to feel too easy. Life seems full of moments that could have gone differently. A different school, a different habit, a different friendship, a different risk, and you end up with a different version of yourself. You can imagine many possible lives: one where you become a musician, one where you become a scientist, one where you stay where you started and never really test yourself. The fact that these alternatives feel real suggests that our choices matter, even if not absolutely.
That is where free will becomes frightening. If your choices really shape your future, then decisions carry weight. They are not just events that happen to you. They are things you are involved in. That makes life more meaningful, but it also makes it more stressful.
Take something simple, like choosing a university program. Under a deterministic view, even if the choice has consequences, it still feels lighter. You can tell yourself that whichever subject you choose was always the only thing you could have chosen. But under a free-will view, the same decision becomes heavier. Then it seems possible that you could have gone in several directions, and that your present life is partly the result of what you chose and what you ignored.
That is why determinism often works as a coping mechanism. It protects people from guilt. If everything is fixed, then regret becomes less personal. You do not have to ask whether you failed to think clearly, whether you avoided risk, or whether you chose comfort over honesty. You can simply say that it had to happen that way.
At the same time, too much freedom creates its own kind of anxiety. People are often more afraid of having many options than of having none. A life with a fixed path can feel restrictive, but it can also feel safe. You do not have to keep asking what you should do with yourself. By contrast, a life full of open possibilities can become paralyzing. Every option creates another possible mistake.
This is not just about careers. It is about how life feels in general. Most people do not only fear suffering. They also fear uncertainty. They want some structure behind events, some reason, some reassurance that their life is not random. That is one reason religion, fate, and the idea of a divine plan remain powerful. They make suffering easier to interpret.
But the same mindset can become pessimistic very quickly. If you believe that pain is simply written into your life, then effort starts to look pointless. You stop seeing yourself as an actor and start seeing yourself as a passenger. Life becomes something you watch rather than something you shape.
So we seem to be caught between two difficult ideas. On one side, a world with no guarantee, no script, and no final explanation. On the other, a world where our choices actually matter, which means we are responsible for much more than we would like.
Even so, I think the practical belief in free will is better for how a person lives. Maybe we do not control everything. Maybe we do not even understand how much of us is shaped by chance, biology, or circumstance. But the belief that our actions matter is still valuable. It gives us a reason to act instead of waiting.
Think about someone living in a poor country with very few opportunities. A deterministic view does not help much unless it comes with the promise that success is guaranteed anyway. Most of the time it does not. But if that person believes their choices can still change something, even a little, then a small opportunity becomes meaningful. They may study, work harder, learn a skill, move somewhere else, or simply refuse to stay where they are. That belief does not guarantee success, but it creates motion.
That is why I think the free-will mindset is more useful, even if the metaphysics remain unclear. It does not remove fear, uncertainty, or failure. It just gives them a different meaning. It tells us that our efforts are not empty, that our decisions are part of the story, and that our future is not something we can only watch from a distance.