Written in the Pages: Fate, Free Will, and the Fear of the Unknown

    Think for a moment: imagine that a book arrives at your door. As you pick it up, you feel its weight in your hands—hefty, lined with a leather binding, the pages uneven and ripped. There is no label or image on it. Curiously, you sit down and set the leather cover onto the wooden table. Your tea, which you set on the stove a while ago, has started screeching, so you get up, leaving the mysterious book behind. With a full cup of strong black tea, you sit back down, finding yourself strangely drawn to the book. As you open it, your eyes widen as it begins to tell the story of your life from the beginning all the way to the end.

    Within our society, most of us are drawn to the idea of knowing our future. Students fantasize about their future college or career; children wonder what adolescence will be like; and working people contemplate when retirement will come around. Some find safety in knowing what’s ahead, perhaps trying to prevent it. Now, it depends on how the book works: maybe it serves as a cautionary tale, helping you avoid bad things, or perhaps it is the very precautions you take that lead you to the dreaded events. Hypothetically, if the book were to reveal future events, offering you a chance to diverge from that path and create a new one to escape those events, it could very well be possible to extend your ending—your death.

    Death is a tantalizing phenomenon, a topic humanity has wrestled with since the dawn of time. The fountain of youth, vampires, phoenixes, gods and goddesses—all these mythical stories arise from the idea of immortality. What if we had the ability to live forever? In some ways, we’ve figured out how to achieve a semblance of that: legacy. If we can become very memorable or exceptionally famous, we can be remembered, thus making ourselves immortal, in a way. If we knew how we would die, we’d most likely do everything to prevent it. However, if we weren’t given a specific day—if the last page of the book did not tell us exactly when we would meet our demise—then that would create a sense of paranoia.

    While we are busy perfecting the minor details of our lives and preventing the small parts that don't fit our image of our dream future, we can become lost in a close-minded frenzy, unable to see the bigger picture. But what if you were given the exact circumstances under which you would meet your demise, yet never told the time of that day? Frankly, you would live in paranoia—for most likely the rest of your life. This leads me to my question that I prompt you all to consider: fate or free will?