Is It Your Own Life? Free Will Exists, But…

In Neon Genesis Evangelion, Shinji constantly pilots the Eva to keep his father happy and help save other people. But the hardest part is that he basically has no choice. Technically, he can refuse. But when refusing could mean people die, his friends get hurt, or his father rejects him again, is that really a free choice?

Free will is the ability of people to make choices and direct their own actions independently of outside forces, fate, or prior physical events.

In my other posts about free will, I mainly questioned whether my choices are actually mine. My goals, hobbies, beliefs, and preferences are constantly shaped by other people, social media, my environment, and past experiences, which makes it hard to know how much of what I want is genuinely self-chosen. I don’t think there’s an obvious answer, but free will makes me question why I do what I do and whether I could ever make a choice completely free from outside influence.

The reason why a lot of people are fascinated by the concept of free will is mainly because of control.

Do we have control over our own bodies and accomplishments? Is everything genetics or luck? Being born in Asia might be a completely different experience from growing up in Kansas. Is there one key factor behind success? People say obsession. Some say geographical luck. But even disregarding accomplishments, the day-to-day choices you are forced to make have less to do with success and more to do with emotion.

Logically, you can right now decide to pack your bags, go to Italy, buy a small house, live the rest of your life there, and delete all social media. There are obviously limitations. You might not have the money, but you can take out loans. You might not have a visa, but you can try to get one. If there is a will, there is usually some kind of way.

But I also understand that I can’t just decide to be in the NBA. I’m 6 feet tall and didn’t grow up playing basketball. There are biological, psychological, and environmental limitations.

I don’t think the argument about free will is really about whether you can do anything you want, because technically, you have options in a lot of situations. It’s more about how emotion, logic, circumstance, and consequence limit those options.

The argument is about control.

Shinji could neglect everything and leave. He actually tried to do that. He was going to get on a train and disappear, but he keeps coming back. It becomes this vicious cycle that is almost impossible to escape when he knows the magnitude of the consequences if he doesn’t pilot the Eva and help save humanity.

But the interesting thing about him being a pilot is that people slowly start to respect him more, and he begins to feel like he has a purpose. He feels valuable. His dad, who gives him almost no affection, gets disappointed when he refuses to pilot the Eva. People at school talk about him being a pilot. The other pilots talk to him and become his friends. He has meaning because even though deep down he doesn’t want to carry the mission, the mission gives him a purpose.

When you are making a career decision and your family is poor, how can you justify going to art school? How can you choose to put all your attention into traveling the world? It becomes hard not to become an engineer, study finance, or try to build a successful business. Yes, there are numerous exceptions, but circumstance still shapes the options that feel realistic.

Cristiano Ronaldo said that one of the biggest things his son is going to struggle with is hunger. Hunger for greatness and hunger to prove people wrong. Ronaldo grew up with very little, and that struggle helped create a hunger that couldn’t simply be taught.

So CR Jr. might have the free will to choose to become like his dad, but one limiting factor is that he never had to struggle in the same way.

Maybe CR Jr. doesn’t even want to play football, but doing it makes his dad happy.

Free will is confusing because how do you genuinely know what you want at any given moment? There is always some external component influencing your judgment.

So maybe some people are forced into paths they can’t control. But can they take more control over their own path in the future? More and more, I think they can.

Going far away to Vinland isn’t really a solution. It’s probably impossible to come up with something that has 100% pure intrinsic value when all of our opinions and thoughts are shaped by previous experiences. If you took a person and completely isolated them for the rest of their life, their thoughts still wouldn’t be created from nothing. They would still carry memories, language, values, fears, and experiences from before the isolation.

Even though I used Vinland Saga as a joke earlier, Thorfinn, the main character, is actually a perfect example of free will. He was destined to be a warrior. His father was a mighty warrior, and Thorfinn grew up surrounded by violence and expectations that pushed him toward the same path. For a long time, he followed it.

Eventually, though, the endless wars took a toll on him. He consciously chose a different path. He no longer wanted to be a warrior. He wanted to become a kind person.

That represents free will to a T. Even though becoming a warrior was heavily influenced by his environment and upbringing, he was still able to reject that path and choose something different for himself.

However, maybe even that choice was not entirely his own. His father, Thors, had already planted the idea in him that “you have no enemies.” So even Thorfinn’s decision to reject violence raises another question: was he truly exercising free will, or was he simply following a different influence that had been placed in him years earlier?

That’s the issue with free will. Everything has to originate from something. That something is derived from what you watch, feel, and experience. So if all of your thoughts come from other things, can you ever really make a decision entirely for yourself?

And now I’ve contradicted myself.