Fate’s Bogus

This video will blow your mind. But I still think fate is a bunch of ballyhoo. Now read my blog.

Is there an omnipotent force that determines every step of our lives? I don’t think so. I believe in the notion that what you want to achieve solely results from your own actions. If you want to become successful, then you have to work hard to earn it. There’s nothing that forces you to become a specific person; it’s your own life.

Life would be bland if it cohered with the idea of fate. If you knew your life from beginning to end, and if there was no purpose in changing anything, what would be the point of living? Ideally, life should be an exciting adventure, full of quirks and unexpected turns. But by accepting a predestined path for your life, you would be essentially limiting your potential to explore and do great things. Do you want to be someone like that? Someone who strives for nothing and mopes around all day, believing that the outcome of their life is already set in stone? Because people like that are definitely not the ones who have meaningful accomplishments in their lives. Fate turns you into an apathetic individual. Instead, realize that you can control your own life, and do something about it!

Interestingly, Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse Five suggests that the world does revolve around fate. Billy’s time traveling ability implies that his life is a like a story that has already been written: Billy can revisit the events in his life, but he can do nothing to change anything that happens. This reinforces the concept of an unalterable existence. Vonnegut also uses the Traufmadorian perspective to allude to fate. Traufmadorians see the world as a long stretch of events that are bound to happen. When Billy talks about free will, this is how a Traufmadorian responds:

“If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings, I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by free will. I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.”

Evidently, free will seems like an absurd concept to Traufmadorians. Vonnegut uses Traufmadorian philosophy to explore the idea of fate.

Even though Vonnegut's book strongly suggests that life is a series of unchangeable events, I still find his evidence to be flawed. On what grounds am I to be persuaded, if Vonnegut uses a delusional Billy, who cracked his head in a plane crash, and a far-fetched extraterrestrial species, to convey his ideas of existentialism and fate? Both of Vonnegut’s means seem ridiculous. There is no credibility to his proof. Quite ironically, free will seems even more appealing to me now after Vonnegut’s bizarre and abstract connections to fate.

Vonnegut displays a strong appeal to fate in Slaughterhouse Five. The notion of there being a fate, however, still seems completely bogus to me after analyzing his absurd connections and comparing my argument to his. So is there really a superior power called fate, which controls our lives? I doubt it. Free will prevails.