The Lived Experience

Do I believe in determinism? Do I believe in science? Do I believe in accidents or cause and effect? Do I believe that leisure is the mother of philosophy? The latter definitely, the rest less so. I do and I don't. I struggle with determinism; I struggle with the fact that science always requests evidence or tries to trace any event to a cause, a logical explanation, for it seems to me science and scientific opinion refutes a person's lived experience, because they cannot believe in anything science hasn't demonstrated to be true, even though they have a will of their own which they regularly exercise.
I don't believe we are thrown into the world; I believe we have agreed to enter, or return to, it. And determined, too, some of the circumstances we are born into. We may not like, nor understand, the choices we've made, but I don't believe our race, our sex, our family are largely accidental. At some stage, prior to commencing the journey, they were within our control.
I don't believe in positive discrimination; I believe in no discrimination at all. Quotas only tip the scales of discrimination the opposite way.
I believe most of us, at some point, experience the inability to feel pleasure; with some of us it's a lifelong complaint.
I believe some of us remain disengaged by choice, and then flirt all the time with thoughts that cannot be, even if the chance or the opportunity arises, overcome; in moments where they are their disappearance does not last long. Faking it doesn't make it. Faking it is torture.

Picture credit: Here I and Sorrow Sit, (red crayon on paper), by William James (source: MS Am 109.2 (55) _Houghton Library, Harvard University).

Journal entry, September 2021. See Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life by John Kaag.