Doing well, you?

A veggie burger, large fries with no salt, and a small concrete mixer. Chocolate please, with peanut butter and cheesecake as the mix ins. Thanks.

:(

It fluctuates between INTJ and INTP, but the Myers-Briggs personality test isn't something you should rely on. There's minimal scientific evidence supporting it, just a lot of marketing. Try the Big Five instead, it's actually scientifically validated.

No, I don't.

As time goes on, science links more and more of human behavior to concrete biological and environmental factors. By "environment," I don't just mean your physical environment — it's everything around you, like the people and information you're exposed to. Society used to see autism, drug addition, and obesity as moral failings or influence from the devil, but today we know that's not the case. Same with personality traits and day-to-day moods. The more we learn, the more we understand that human actions are triggered by situational, genetic, or other factors that we have minimal control over, rather than some sort of free-will decision making on our part. I suspect it's only a matter of time before we're able to attribute nearly all of human behavior to our biology and environment.

And if we're just a function of our biology and environment, with no supernatural influences, I see no room for free will.

This doesn't mean you can't change, or that you're doomed to repeat the past. I just think that everything we are and that we do is based on our biology, environment, and the interaction between those two, meaning that's where change has to come from. You live your life on a general trajectory and that trajectory only changes if your biology or environment changes.

Here's the thing: you can change your environment, which affects you, which affects your environment, and so on. It's sort of like a free will hack!

If you want to change, do something to change your environment: learn new things, try new things. Just knowing that you can change, that change needs to come from somewhere concrete, helps. You're not deficient in "will power." You're just locked into your current trajectory until something new comes into that equation, like a poorly written and unconvincing FAQ answer that tells you that you can change your environment and live a better life.

I often make myself laugh. Others? Not so much.

Yes, I frequently ask myself these questions.