There are laws and expectations that people expect we should follow, There are things that our society likes and things that it does not like.
So when people ask if we really have the ability to make our choices, yes I can see why they ask that, for me I think adults do have the ability to make their choices, we use our brains to figure out what we want to do and what we do not want to do.
Just because there are rules does not mean we do not have choices.
Think about it we make decisions every day, we choose what we want to be, we choose where we want to work, we choose who we want to be around, we choose our friends, our relationships and how we react to things that happen to us.
Nobody is standing over us telling us what to do every second, tes society has boundaries, within those boundaries we still have a lot of choices.
For example society says we should not steal, does that mean we do not have the ability to make our choices? I do not think so. A person can still choose to steal if they want to, they might get in trouble, they still have the choice.
That is why I think the ability to make our choices is not about being able to do anything we want, It is about being able to make decisions for ourselves. The truth is, we probably do not have freedom anywhere.
Even if we lived alone on an island there would still be things that limit what we can do, nature would still have rules that we have to follow.
So I do not think that just because there are rules it means we do not have the ability to make our choices. What I think happens is that as adults we learn to think about our options, we think about what might happen if we make choices, we think about our responsibilities and we think about how our choices affect other people, then we make our decisions.
Sometimes people get confused, and think that being responsible means we are not free, just because I choose not to do something does not mean I was not free to do it, It just means I thought about what might happen and decided not to do it.
I also think that experience teaches us a lot, we get older we realize that every choice we make has consequences, some choices help us get what we want, some choices causes us problems.
So Instead of just doing what we feel like all the time , we learn to use our brains and make good choices , that does not make us less free, If anything it makes our freewill more meaningful.
At the time I understand that society can make people feel like they have to live certain ways, there are expectations about what kind of job we should have, whether we should get married and what it means to be successful, sometimes people feel trapped by those expectations, sometimes people make choices just because they are afraid of what other people might think.
Yes that does happen, even then there are people who choose to do things differently even if it means people will criticize them, there are people who walk away from what society expects and follow what they really want, that shows that we still have the ability to make our choices.
It might not always be easy to make our choices and it might not always be comfortable, we still have the power to choose what we do, as adults we use our brains to figure out what we want to do and what we should, and what we are willing to live with after we make our choices.
In my opinion that is what the ability to make our own choices is really about.
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