Then glitches, manifesting through spinning of the idea, began to appear across the stream of your life.

Sometimes they were mild — like moments when scrolling for cat videos on your phone was the thing happening when all of you wanted to do something else. Other times, they were monumentally jarring — like when the world stopped because invisible particles were passing through cities and killing people. A pandemic.

Surely it made zero sense to turn to the friend whose mother the pandemic had claimed — a woman with plans and goals and dreams — to speak in terms being in control of one's destiny. 

You, along with everyone else, were and are at the mercy of forces holding the reins of your life.

The response to this realization — that you are not in control — might be confusion and anxiety. What if the tides of the forces wash you ashore some unremarkable place? What if all your effort, all your intentional acts, still leave you somewhere plain, unwanted, or unseen?

What if?

It would mean wherever you ended would have had nothing to do with you. A liberating thought, born from the very idea that you are bound.

Yet to allow free rein to the forces is to be at the mercy of consequences — some, deeply unpleasant.

Didn’t turn in a good essay because "forces" made you watch funny cat videos on YouTube? Well, the F to be graded to you can stand for failure — set to potentially raise higher the constraints around the unfolding of your life. Consequences.

You may be without control of your destiny, but there are effects to be found from causes manifesting from you — intentions acted on, habits repeated, moments embraced or resisted. Effects you have capacity to support or to denounce.

You are not without agency.

Perhaps the opportunity lies not in (who or what has) control, but in what can be shaped through a capacity to respond — where choice becomes relevant, and the ability to apply effort offers ways to shape consequences.

Say you find yourself scrolling through videos on YouTube. It's been three hours and you keep telling yourself, "I promise, this is the last video". Three hours becomes eight. This was not how you spent yesterday. Eight hours feels like a blow, so you pick yourself up and tell yourself you will not open YouTube again. But the next day, after 90 minutes at your work desk, you find yourself back on your couch, scrolling through videos. How come you are behaving this way?

It turns out your subscription to Freedom App expired without renewal. The app helped keep social media apps closed on your devices. Now you have been relying on volition alone to manage your relationship with scrolling — an exercise that draws on limited mental resources, to battle the addictive gravity of platforms engineered to keep you watching. One minute you are mindful and deliberate. The next minute, you are mindlessly watching videos. Consequences.

A presence of agency means an opportunity to shape different consequences through actions and available resources. Perhaps renewing your subscription is the course to take. Whatever course is chosen is consequential. And there lies the crux of the matter.

You can choose. 

You can participate. You can even take your participation to the extreme of the idea that you are in complete control. Every decision, a vote for what can (not should) become — while being fully aware, and at peace, that even the decisions themselves arise from origins unknown.

The question isn't whether you are without freedom. The question isn't who is in control. The question is: what are you going to do about it?