Back in high school, I realized that free will didn’t exist. To be more accurate: I realized that the term didn’t really make much sense. The choices you make are dependent on your past experiences and your current mental and physical state. But these, in turn, are decided by past events, all the way through until the moment of your birth and your genetic makeup. And these in turn were decided by further past events: physical causes-and-effects stretching back all the way to the birth of our universe. A set of initial conditions combined with the ruleset of physics has played reality out like a script, evolving with time. When did any freedom come in?

You could argue that some effects happen without prior causes (say, how a wave function collapses in quantum mechanics), but since you do not decide how they happen (they happen WITHOUT causes after all), freedom once again proves lacking. And if you decide that ‘free will’ is just meant as a practical concept, i.e. that human decisions are difficult to predict accurately, then a coin-flip-powered chess robot has free will too¹.

But although ‘free will’ is kind of a nonsense term, understanding why is in my opinion of incredible personal value. Because once you understand that the choices you or anyone else makes are the products of things ultimately beyond one’s control, it should engender a great tolerance of poor choices! When you look at past mistakes you’ve made, know that ANYONE would’ve made those exact same mistakes in your exact shoes². Similarly, If you were in someone else’s exact shoes, you would make their same mistakes as well.

Knowing this, you ought to be incredibly sympathetic with the mistakes you or anyone else has made. It does not mean you should not strive to improve yourself, and it does not mean we should abandon any sort of punishment in our legal system (as, although punishment for retribution’s sake is probably unjustified, deterrence, safety, and rehabilitation are still valid motivations). It also does not mean you need to interact with people you find distasteful. But you should remember that, in a sense, we are all just passengers on different and intertwining roller coasters of life.

I would also add that, although I don’t believe in karma, you will not be alone in noticing someone is a jerk. Whether their reasons for being one are due to unfortunate circumstance or not, their obnoxious actions or negative mindset will almost certainly lead them to further difficulty and a worse life than one if they were kind and considerate. So they are not worth your time and emotional energy hating, rather they should be pitied. And you should hope that they learn to be kinder people in the future, for both themselves and those that they will interact with.

1. There is a whole long debate on what free-will ought to mean and whether it is compatible with determinism. But I consider this debate mostly one of definitions (i.e. dumb), and its outcome is not really relevant to the point I wish to make in this article.
2. When I say exact shoes, I mean the same genetics, history, & everything. Even the same “die rolls” on any truly random processes. Effectively, you ARE this person, your point of view has just shifted into their body.