Anonymously submitted

Whether free will exists or not is open for debate. When you are a child, most of your life is determined for you. For many people, what happens as an adult may also seem determined; we are told that once we graduate high school we are expected to either go to college or get a job, and eventually have a family. Then, once we reach a certain age, we are allowed to retire. For many people, their lives may seem even more determined: what they major in at college, job they get, religion they practice, and whom they marry may be limited by expectations from their families or society. Free will can also be inhibited by other factors such as mental or physical illnesses or disabilities. For many people, this can result in the feeling of not having any free will. In life there are many deterministic factors, but from my experience, through free will we can overcome them.

Although I was never told what I was supposed to do when I grew up, I always felt my decisions were limited. This was mostly due to my severe anxiety that I have dealt with all my life. Throughout my childhood, I had paralyzing anxiety that prevented me from talking to anyone at all, except for half a dozen specific people.  For most of my life, my anxiety has felt as though it has dictated what I can and cannot do. There have been many times where I have wanted to do something, but it has inhibited my ability to freely make my own decisions; essentially it has had a power over me resulting in many missed opportunities and experiences. My anxiety resulted in me failing the seventh grade and my mother making the hard decision to homeschool me.

Unfortunately, homeschooling did not work out so well. My mother could not afford to stay home and teach me and I had little motivation to actually do the school work that I was assigned. I did end up receiving my GED at 18, but having no high school transcripts made attending college look impossible. I remember trying to apply to a college, even going so far as to drive to the college and take an admissions test – only to be told that due to my lack of having a chemistry lab, I couldn’t go to school there and to look into community college. Unfortunately for me, my local community college did not offer chemistry. These deterministic forces acting against my going to college led me to feel like I was determined to never go and my future options were limited. If you asked me at this point in my life if I had free will, I would have said “no”.

So for years I allowed this to be the case, accepting that I was fated to not amount to much of anything in my life.  College would forever be an impossibility and I was okay with that; my previous experiences had soured my desire to pursue further education. I, much like Waller’s “willing slave,” had internalized the idea that I was happier not going to college. It was my choice not to go to college, but in the view of deep compatibilism it was not a truly free choice. That was up until two summers ago. Something in me clicked; one could say I exerted my “contra causal freewill,” I was able to “defy [my] history” and “act in a new way”. Despite my anxieties, I moved out on my own and I started a job that involved interacting with the public.  That fall, I decided that I wanted to go back to college despite my past experience. What caused this to happen was my own free will; there were no outside influences, and nothing had changed in my life.

Despite my history, I do not feel the only way we can have free will is through overcoming our conditioning through will power alone. There are times where free will manifests in a more compatibilist form. The decision of what to major in is difficult for anyone. When I decided that I was going to attend SMCC, I originally was unsure of what to major in. Eventually I decided to get my Associate’s degree in liberal arts with the intention of transferring to USM for computer science. This was a choice I freely made, but was aided by pre-determining factors. Like many college students I have changed my major several time; as I weighed in on how much school I will need, what the job market is like, and so on. But what most influenced my decision the most was the fact that I had an interest in the field: it was my own free choice and I could have easily chosen otherwise.

Even though I have overcome a lot, it is still easy to get into a fatalistic state of mind. Like many students, I had led myself to the view that I was horrible at math because I had taken few math classes prior to college. From the start I led myself to believe that I would fail and I had a fatalistic point of view that no matter how hard I studied it would not matter. Through hard work I was able to overcome what felt fated, and not only passed but found myself enjoying the subject. The ability for people to overcome what seems to be fated is further evidence for the existence of free will.

Now my view of free will has changed. After overcoming these deterministic forces, I feel as though free will does exist. However, outside influences impact how that free will can be exercised and as a result I disagree with Sartre’s existentialist views of free will. I do agree with the idea of compatibilism: we have free will to make choices, but the choices we make can be reflections of our environment or history.

Regardless of what past or external influences may have affected my choices, I still demonstrated the kind of free will that Hume described as “a power of acting or not acting according to the determination of the will”. At the same time there are times where free will seems to agree with Campbell’s libertarian free will, where “nothing determines the act save the agent doing it”. If there were no free will, I would not have been able to overcome my anxieties, leave my home state and go to college; my anxiety would have prevented me from doing so.