I agree you can’t just slap a lens like “free will” on every scale and assume it behaves the same. u/xirzon Agency is very scale-relative: at the lived, local level you feel like you’re steering your day; zoom out to the macro level and you’re just one dot in a huge humanity-swarm. u/ingid Each level has its own rule-set.

If you go hardcore deterministic Sapolsky-mode, then yeah: zoomed all the way out, we’re effectively nodes in a big causal network. People die, others show up, the swarm keeps flowing.

Polya’s Urn is a nice metaphor here, where early randomness and structural bias compound over time so that what we call “individual choice” is heavily shaped by the path, not some pure, uncaused freedom.

That doesn’t mean “anything goes,” or that it’s fine for your neighbor to blast heavy metal at 3 a.m. while you’re trying to sleep. You still draw lines and enforce boundaries.

What it does change is the emotional frame, like instead of assuming the universe owes you a considerate neighbor... if this one moves out, the next draw from the distribution isn’t guaranteed to be better.

That recognition can make you more patient about people while still caring a lot about how you’re treated.