The Illusion of Choice

There are moments when I wonder if I am doing enough. The thought arrives uninvited, creeping into the stillness of my mind, stirring something uneasy. Maybe I should be working harder, accumulating more, stretching further into some undefined path. Maybe I am falling behind, oblivious to the pace of the world around me. I tell myself that if I could just do one thing, find one answer, everything else will work out.

But that is an illusion. The decisions I have made, all of them, were mine. Even the ones that seemed impulsive, even the ones that ended in failure, even the ones I claimed to regret. They were not accidents. I chose them. Not consciously, but in some quiet, buried part of myself, I wanted them.

We like to believe we are ruled by logic, but we are not. The subconscious always acts first. It knows what we will do long before we do. It whispers in the background, shaping our desires, bending our choices, leading us into situations we later pretend were forced upon us.

It is easy to say that life simply happens to us. That we are victims of circumstance, that things went wrong because of bad timing, bad luck, bad people. That we were pushed into a corner and had no real choice at all. But that is never entirely true. Even the worst choices were ours. We choose suffering as often as we choose pleasure. Sometimes we run toward what will break us because we are drawn in by something we cannot explain. Sometimes we avoid what could make us whole because we are repelled by its unfamiliarity. The subconscious does not care about good or bad, right or wrong. It moves in the direction of what is inevitable.

I have tried to blame external forces for my failures, but deep down, I know better. I know why I made some decisions, why I walked away from certain opportunities, why I let myself sink into places I had no business being. I knew, on some level, what each choice meant. But I made them anyway. Because they aligned with something within me, even if I did not understand what that was at the time.

The same is true for everyone. The life you say you want, if you truly wanted it, you would already be living it. And if you are struggling to decide, forcing yourself into something you don’t even want, then just know it was never in you to begin with.

This is why guilt is so often misplaced. If you keep telling yourself you should be doing something but never do it, the truth is simple: you do not actually want to. At least not in a way that matters. It is not laziness. It is not fear. It is that your subconscious does not believe in it, does not value it, does not see it as something you truly need. So it resists it. It drags you elsewhere, into distractions, into habits that feel more natural, into choices that, even if they seem destructive, make more sense to you than the path you keep pretending you should be on.

I have come to understand that trusting my decisions does not come from forcing. It means recognizing where I am already moving effortlessly. It means understanding that every decision I have ever made was not random, not imposed upon me, but chosen by the deepest parts of me, whether I liked it or not.

The past is not a collection of mistakes. It is a map of who you have always been. The present is simply the continuation of that path. And the future will be built exactly the same way, by the choices you will inevitably make, the ones that were already decided before you ever had the illusion of choice.

So if you find yourself questioning where you are, wondering why you are not doing more, ask yourself if you truly even want it. More than likely, you just like the idea of wanting it. If there is resistance, if you keep finding ways to avoid it, that is your answer. And if something feels right, even if it makes no sense, even if it leads somewhere uncertain, that is your answer too.

You were always going to end up here.

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