Free From What? Exploring the Bounds of Freewill and Determinism

Naval Ravikant once tweeted, “Write to learn, not to teach.” That stuck with me. When I go back and read my own writing, I don’t just see what I thought—I find things I didn’t know I knew. That’s the analytical process Jung talked about, playing out on the page.

Recently I took on Naval’s meditation challenge: sixty minutes of meditation daily for sixty days. No guided sessions. No focus on the breath. No anchors at all. Just sit there and surrender.

I’ve meditated before—over 300 consecutive days on Sam Harris’s Waking Up app, mostly ten-minute sessions. But this is different. Ten minutes with guidance is training wheels. Sixty minutes with nothing is free fall.

Two days in, my meditation produced a vivid image: a typewriter materializing in front of me, typing words that floated off the page and melted into the air. The words wouldn’t stick. They just dissolved. Beautiful image. But it didn’t give me freedom. It gave me a question.

Freedom from what, exactly?

That question took me somewhere interesting. Are we freeing ourselves from the distractions of daily life? From the tyranny of reactive thinking? Or are we tapping into something deeper—the collective unconscious, the vast reservoir of shared human experience that most of us never access because we’re too busy scrolling our phones?

I talked about this with a friend—a genuine thinker who’s spent years wrestling with free will versus determinism. His take: if life is predominantly deterministic, then breaking free even a little bit is extraordinarily hard. Most people won’t bother. The effort required makes it seem pointless.

But what if you could shift the ratio? What if you could live with 51% free will and 49% determinism instead of the other way around? What would that even look like? And what would it cost?

Here’s what I’ve noticed: pursuing freedom is work. Real work. It’s far easier to default to consumption, to follow impulse, to let your emotions run the show. Sitting in silence for sixty minutes isn’t relaxing. It’s confrontational. You meet everything you’ve been avoiding.

Each minute of stillness doesn’t just offer calm. It offers a glimpse of the invisible forces that have been directing your life. And once you see those forces, you have a choice you didn’t have before.

That might be the only freedom that matters.