I don’t believe strongly in either self-determination or inevitability. I think both are easy to get wrong and where it concerns anything that matters, the truth is both too complicated to discern and impossible to verify.

Experience has shown me that our ability to determine what brought us to a given point is deeply lacking. The natural and helpful¹ instinct of the mind to create a plausible, comfortable, and simple explanation for any given (or perceived) reality is fantastically fallible and we are never likely to reliably overcome it. Moreover, if we were to overcome it, life may well cease to be worth living.

This belief shares a theme with my beliefs (touched on here) that it is with emotions and entropy (randomness, disorder), not without, that we find meaning.