One of my foundations of belief is that life is entirely about probabilities and chance. It's a sort of guiding force that I follow. I view everything similarly to how you do, in that we cannot possibly know for sure it's outcome. By extension, we cannot possibly know what the right choice is for us. Sometimes, you have to close your eyes and roll the dice.
I'm deeply interested in the random nature of the world / life. When you stop to think about it so much of our existence is truly random in nature right down to our conception. It boggles the mind to think how little control we had over even our own existence.
As for identity I'm also a free will skeptic as you put it.
Anyways, just thought I'd let you know that people like you are out there. I also find it a bummer that we're a huge minority, but such is life I suppose.
As you also indicated I genuinely struggle to find people with similar frequencies and views.
Even with things being predetermined, our conscience minds still desire to optimize our existences with what we ultimately see as choices and decisions.
I’m this case, free will can then be preserved as an ideological concept that emerges within a deterministic system that breeds consciousness.
I definitely agree people way overestimate what they can predict about their choices. There are a few choices you can't take back but most of the time you're continuously choosing (mainly on auto-pilot) along a path, it's not a binary choice. Like most of us could, tomorrow, stop working in software and/or move to a different country for example. It would be hard but it's not like you chose once and now you're stuck forever.
While it’s important to know logic systems have limitations (somewhat of an analogue to our understanding of the world), it’s important that we make use of that knowledge by trying to find different mental frameworks that are useful to us and help us move closer to our desires (whether it be a framework for the discovery of more math or a framework that guides us further along our pursuit of happiness)
Normally I can get friends to agree with most of the propositions, even that 'they' don't ultimately exist in the conventional western sense, but I don't think they buy into it emotionally, which is probably where it counts.
I'm in exactly the same boat, and I am only 28.
Reminds me of: "The man quite often knows what he does, he never knows what does what he does." (P. Valery)
>I also don't know who "I" am.
"Only the shallow know themselves." (O. Wilde)
In my mid-50s, I started listening to Alan Watts and learning about ancient Indian religions / philosophies. My world-view today is some kind of cross between Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. I'm a free will skeptic, as well.
While I'm not paralyzed by it, I've come to think that we can't know how any decision we make is going to turn out. We can't know with certainty if doing X is going to be good or bad for us in the long run. All we have are our own estimates of probabilities, and I'm not sure how well we can estimate them, either, honestly.
I also don't know who "I" am, or where I begin or end. In infancy and childhood, I think we come to accept a belief that "we" are individuals, each residing in our physical bodies. Yet I understand the Universe to be a single thing (a quantum field? a simulation?) and so the idea of us being individuals seems a bit off to me. I think we are far more connected and interdependent than we usually recognize.
One good outcome of my world view is that I don't really worry about passing away. A less pleasant outcome is that my world view is so out of the ordinary that I don't often connect with people that I can talk about this with in any serious way.