I haven't talked to Hypermak for more than a year now. I am pretty sure he is happy and safe doing whatever he's doing back in Italy. I don't know why you say he is a "big believer in free will" (and I cannot be bothered digging through his old posts, sorry) but I can repeat you what I already told you about free will, and the way it affects our lives.
From what I know of you, based on your accounts, you grew up in an upper-middle class family where your Mom & Dad probably behaved in an unusual way, compared to the stereotypical Asian-American "tiger parents". They didn't force you to learn piano, they probably never ensured you got straight A's and prepped you to an ivy-league college. They let you do whatever you wanted, they let you be whoever you wanted.
They groomed your teenage free will and kept supporting you throughout your early life choices. After graduation, didn't you join some sort of small circus, or a magician's act? You did some freelance journalism, some writing, something along those lines, as I vaguely recall. Then, at some point, you decided that you wanted to find a social, perhaps sexual, freedom that you believed was off-limits to you in the US. You set out and began your long journey through Russia and some of the Baltic states. I am pretty sure your parents, maybe your Dad alone, supported - and I mean financially - supported your choice to travel.
Some of your detractors mocked you by saying that you wooed a few of those Russian blondies thanks to Daddy's credit card. Whether that's true or not, I don't see anything reprehensible about it. Your Dad understood your needs and wanted to help you with the experience that changed your life. And, more or less partially, more or less indirectly, that of at least a few of us HA members.
In other words, you exercised your free will to engage in unconventional choices - unconventional, at least, by the standard of the typical-ass Asian-American kid whose parents groom to be a doctor, an engineer or a successful classical musician in the worst case scenario.
You engaged in those choices because you could afford to.
And, most importantly, you could afford to for two reasons:
- your Dad actually helped you, at least financially if not emotionally
- if one good thing ever came of your lonely high school year, it was surely the lack of peer pressure that pushed you to conform to a certain mold: hang out with specific kids, play specific sports, take a specific job and act in specific ways. As a withdrawn kid, the world was, literally, your oyster. You took your backpack and your video camera and chose to have your stab at cracking that oyster open.
Just imagine what would have been of you, and all that free will, if your parents had brought you up to be like one of your cousins: an over-educated, career-minded and ultimately super-conformist member of upper-class America. By now you might have been a father of two or three, a husband to an equally-minded Taiwanese-American wife. You might have had a big house somewhere in suburban LA, perhaps a vacation home by a lake or beach, where you would take your family during the rare long weekends that you can, or want to, steal from your relentless office routine.
If that had been you, your cousin, you certainly wouldn't be complaining. You certainly wouldn't have even begun to ruminate on the notion of being "happier abroad" because your clinic or office, your home and family and those two weeks a year of vacation would be all there is to your life. They would be the complete perimeter of your existence, the pretty wooden fence studded with those big red roses.
All of this to say, dear Winston, that we are indeed the product of our free will, from those acts of free will which we can recognise as remarkable, essential, pivotal to our existence, down to small choices we deem trivial, obvious, and we forget about 5 minutes later.
Perhaps most importantly, our free will isn't free at all. It can grow and thrive with the right kind of support, a particularly stubborn or rebellious personality, or the happenstance of being born in a super-liberal or hippy family, or perhaps an abusive one where the only way is the way out. It can also be bridled and driven, beat into shape and muted by peer pressure and conformism.
The moment we take on somebody else's dreams, yes, we gain clarity, a certain direction, a method, probably. However, we do so at the cost of never knowing what dreams we would have been capable of, if only we had the time, the chance, the energy, the courage to conjure them up, to hold onto them long and hard enough.
A bit from a song by the Dave Matthews Band just sprung to mind. I think it sounds beautiful, and relevant.
I don't want to wake up
Lost in the dreams of our fathers.
Oh, it's such a waste, child
To live and die for the dreams of our fathers
Though I must confess, yes
My view is a wonder about this
This love I possess, love
It must be the dreams of our fathers.
