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Are you really in control?

The actuality behind your free will and you

By Aidan Mouellic, Contributor

he idea of being in control

of your life and where it will go is attractive. Surely we feel in control; not many people would openly say that they aren’t— unless you ask someone who is being tortured. For the most part, we all believe that we're exercising free will over our lives. But we're not.

We don’t have the control we believe we have. You may be thinking of a lot of counter- arguments right now. You may be reading this article while on a school campus, having made the decision yourself to be where you are. But if you stop and ask why you are here and what led you to choose this path, it becomes difficult to answer.

Staying on the example of our chosen scholarly path, let’s

How much ts too much self-esteem?

/ will never be good, and thats not bad’

By Angela Espinoza, Arts Editor

elf-esteem never stops

developing. The people who surrounded you growing up, who surround you now, and who will surround you in the future, affect how you view yourself. Not only people, but the goals you choose to follow and how realistic they are will also determine your self-esteem. How do you feel about yourself right now? How did you get to that point?

Few people go longer than

a week without dazing back into their childhood. The child you were yesterday became the child-like adult you are today. Were you the sporty kid, now athlete? How about the nerd, now science major? Maybe the class clown turned theatre student? It’s unclear how much your childhood labels actually follow you into adulthood. Unfortunately, a popular attempt at building children’s self-esteem is to encourage them

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say you're studying biology because you enjoy it. Why do you enjoy it? Once you remove all of the factors, it becomes apparent that perhaps we are not in control. A lot of what we enjoy and prefer seems to be out of our control.

We are who we are for many reasons. Where we are born and who we are born to determines a lot of how our futures will turn out. We have no say in this. In essence, the biggest and most valuable lottery is the one that determines where you are born and to whom.

As infants, it’s pretty obvious that we don’t have a lot of free will. Our parents, stomachs, and diapers dictate much of what happens to us, but does this change when we are able to walk and talk?

On the contrary, the older we get, the more evidence can be gathered to indicate how little control we have over our lives. Our thoughts, feelings, and actions may be seen as carefully calculated actions

to go after a specific title—even if it’s something that particular child isn’t good at or doesn’t care about. For some children, this can backfire horribly and convince the child they’re not actually good at anything. For other children, this can also backfire, and will convince them

undertaken by intelligent beings but, scientifically, it’s just brain chemicals bouncing around in our heads telling us what feels good and what doesn’t.

If you want to test this, go take some sort of drug, such as MDMaA, and see what you do. Chances are your actions will be much different from what you would normally be doing. If we have free will, why is it then that people do things that they regret while under the influence of certain drugs? It’s because the drugs influence your brain chemicals, which then alter your decisions and thoughts.

Our brains are what control us. It’s the most important organ in the body and there’s still a lot we don’t know about it. I know that it creates the illusion of control, but if that were the case then people wouldn’t get addicted to cocaine and McDonald's. The brain controls us, not the other way around.

It sounds rather silly to state that we are at the mercy of our brains and have no control over

comes into play here; whether you're constantly building yourself up or putting yourself down, that is your “fixed mindset,” and it is something that can be repaired over time— but the key word is ‘time.’

If you take the child who supposedly wasn’t good at

anything. Nothing

is black and white,

and I’m not trying

to say that life is like

an ‘N Sync music

video where we're

all marionettes. I’m

simply saying that we

don’t have as much say

in the outcome of our

lives as we would hope. There is a famous

quote from H. Jackson

Brown Jr. that says,

“When you can’t

change the direction

of the wind—adjust

your sails.” Perhaps it’s

not worth fretting over

how things will end up,

because whatever is

happening to you is just

the way it is, and perhaps

that’s the way it’s meant

to be.

The fact that there is only a 50 per cent chance of that previous over-encouragement actually amounting to anything (in this scenario) is not progressive. We're all human, and what's more inhumane than causing a person’s psyche to fall apart? Rather than teachers,

Unfortunately, a popular attempt at building childrens self-esteem is to encourage them to go after a specific title—even ifits something that particular child isnt good at or doesnt care

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about. For some children, like myself this can backfire horribly

and convince the child theyre not actually good at anything. For other children, this can also backfire, and will convince them to be total dicks.

to be total dicks.

In the same way that an insecure child is dependent on their peers’ approval, so is the overly secure child in that they thrive on showing off their existent or non-existent talents. “Fixed mindset” is a phrase that

anything, and later learned they were actually talented, their

life has a huge turnaround. But if you take the child who was supposedly good at everything, only to learn they are total dicks, then that can completely destroy a person’s self-esteem.

parents, and friends over- encouraging children, all they need to do is encourage children just enough.

There is a fine line between where encouraging a child’s growth and development is welcome, and where it’s simply

a bad decision. But rather than

encourage a child at everything— since that seems to be what backfires most—let the kid find themselves. Taking a moment to step back and being completely uninvolved are not the same thing; it’s okay to let a child kick a ball around or slap their hands in paint without making it the biggest deal in the world.

A phrase that haunts me to this day is, “You're so good at that,” as quoted by too many members of my family. If it turned out I had actually been good at whatever putting Mega Bloks together in a circular shape amounts to, I wouldn’t be here writing this article.

If anything, I’d probably be shitting all over someone else’s day because I would supposedly be better than them. “You're

so good at that” or “You can

do it” needs to stop being said so often, and be replaced with, “Give ita try.”