Free From What? Exploring the Bounds of Freewill and Determinism

Two days into a sixty-day meditation challenge (sixty minutes daily, no guidance, no breath focus, no anchors, just sit there and surrender), my mind 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. Terrible instruction manual.

I’d meditated before: over 300 consecutive days on Sam Harris’s Waking Up app, mostly ten-minute sessions. But ten minutes with guidance is training wheels. Sixty minutes with nothing is sitting in a dark room with yourself and no one to break the silence. And on day two, instead of peace or clarity, my unconscious handed me a typewriter and a question.

Freedom from what, exactly?

That question followed me off the cushion and into a conversation 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.

“So what are we doing?” I asked.

“Maybe trying to go from 49% free will to 51%,” he said. “And hoping that 2% is enough.”

I thought about that for days. Two percent. The difference between a life you’re steering and a life that’s steering you, and it might come down to whether you can sit still long enough to notice who’s actually driving.

Because here’s the thing: sitting in silence for sixty minutes isn’t relaxing. It’s confrontational. You meet everything you’ve been avoiding. Every impulse, every itch, every thought you’ve been outrunning by staying busy. It’s like cleaning out a closet you’ve been shoving things into for years — you don’t find calm in there. You find the mess you’ve been paying rent on.

Each minute of stillness 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.

What are the invisible forces you’d see if you sat still long enough?