Do We Create Our Destiny, or Simply Rationalize the Luck That Shaped Us?

Picture two people telling the story of how they got their job. One says, "I earned it — years of late nights, the right degree, relentless networking." The other says, "Honestly? I was in the right place at the right time." Ask them again in ten years, after a promotion or a layoff, and the stories might completely swap. That's the strange thing about looking back on a life: the facts barely change, but the story we tell about them does.

That tension was the whole evening's subject: do we actually build our own destiny, choice by choice — or do we mostly just get lucky, and then, afterward, write ourselves a flattering narrative to explain it? Over two hours, the group circled this question from a dozen directions — psychology, Stoic philosophy, Hindu theology, Christian faith, existentialism, even the algorithms quietly running our phones — and ended up somewhere more interesting than a simple yes or no.

The Starting Toolkit: Free Will, Determinism, and the Stories We Tell

The session opened with the oldest version of this question: free will versus determinism. In plain terms — do we genuinely choose our path, or is everything, including the "choices" we feel like we're making, simply the next link in a chain of causes stretching back before we were born?

Both sides have holes. If we had complete free will, why do two siblings, raised by the same parents in the same house, end up liking completely different things — one loves chocolate, the other can't stand it? That's hard to explain if upbringing determines everything. But if we had no free will at all, that's hard to square with real life too — the school you went to quietly decided who your friends would be, the city you were born in decided which language you'd think in, and none of that was ever up to you.

From there, the host introduced a few tools for making sense of the murky middle ground:

Survivorship bias — we study the one person who succeeded and try to copy their exact formula, while ignoring the much larger number of people who did the same thing and simply didn't make it. The go-to example that came up was a famous college dropout who built a trillion-dollar company. Everyone remembers him; nobody remembers the thousands of equally hardworking dropouts who didn't become billionaires.
Hindsight bias — once we know how something turned out, we quietly rewrite the story so it looks like it was always going to happen. A couple, ten years into marriage, says "we were always meant to be." But the week before they met, neither of them even knew the other existed.
The just-world hypothesis — our deep need to believe the world is fair. If someone wealthy suddenly goes bankrupt, we look for a moral reason — he must have done something wrong — rather than accept the harder truth that it might simply have been bad luck.
The Stoic dichotomy of control — a 2,300-year-old idea, traced to the philosopher Epictetus: sort your life into "things I control" (your effort, your attitude, your choices right now) and "things I don't" (outcomes, other people, luck) — and stop spending energy on the second pile.
Compatibilism — a gentler middle path. You didn't choose your parents or your starting circumstances, but you're still free to make your own choices within those boundaries. As one participant put it later: you play the cards you're dealt.

And luck itself? One useful definition floated in the room: luck might just be a word for outcomes shaped by too many variables to trace — not proof that nothing caused them, just proof that the cause was too tangled to name.

What If You Took Time Out of the Equation?

An early tangent turned out to shape the rest of the night. One participant suggested that if you remove the linear idea of past, present, and future altogether, the whole meaning of "destiny" and "luck" shifts. They used their own life as the example: choosing to become a dentist rather than an engineer wasn't luck — it was a decision shaped by feelings and circumstances in the moment, not something handed down from outside.

They connected this to dreams: in the unconscious mind, past, present, and future all exist together, collapsed into one. If you can't even locate "before" and "after" while dreaming, what does it mean to say something was luck, or fate, or a choice? Another participant linked this to déjà vu — that eerie sense of having lived a moment before it happens.

It's a strange but useful daily exercise: next time you're deciding something small — what to eat, who to call — try noticing how much of the decision is really about the past (habit) or the future (anxiety about outcome), and how little is actually happening in the present moment at all.

Whose Desires Are Even Yours?

A recurring thread ran through the night: even once you're old enough to make your own choices, how do you know those choices are really yours? The host pointed to something almost everyone experiences daily — social media. The algorithms behind your feed aren't designed to inform you; they're designed to hold your attention and drive profit. So when you feel a sudden desire for something you saw online, is that desire truly your own, or was it manufactured?

Later in the evening, the host pushed this further, framing it as a possible third factor in the whole debate — alongside destiny and luck, is there now a third force: corporations and algorithms that understand human psychology well enough to steer us without our noticing? One participant pushed back on this in the chat, arguing that manipulation still requires a person willing to be swayed — so corporations and algorithms still ultimately operate through human influence, not around it. They reframed the whole question as less "destiny vs. luck" and more "destiny vs. the indomitable human spirit."

A Soul's Long Memory: A Hindu Lens on Karma

One of the richest parts of the evening came from a participant explaining destiny through the lens of Hindu philosophy. The soul, in this view, doesn't die — it moves from one life to the next, the way you might change clothes. Major life events — who you'll marry, when you'll die, the big turning points — are described as largely set in advance. Free will operates in the present: the conscious choices you make today shape what you'll experience next.

Why do siblings raised identically still turn out so differently? This framework offers an answer: karma, spanning multiple lifetimes, and samskaras — deep impressions left in the subconscious from past lives, which quietly shape what we're drawn to, from the food we crave to the music we love, long before we can explain why.

The participant offered a simple image for it: imagine walking into a video store with hundreds of films (a soul choosing a life), picking one, and getting so absorbed in the story that you forget you originally came just to watch — you become the character. In this framework, there's no fixed "good" or "evil," only a mind moving toward or away from a deeper truth — which another participant compared to a chemistry equation seeking equilibrium, where nothing is inherently good or bad, only forces balancing out.

The same participant also unpacked the caste system's actual origin — not birth, but occupation. Society was divided by role (priests and scholars, rulers and soldiers, traders, and labourers — Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra, as another participant named them in the chat), chosen originally by aptitude rather than family, though this was badly distorted over centuries, including under colonial rule. The teaching that tied it together: give your actions full effort, but stay detached from the outcome — because attachment to a specific result, more than anything else, is the root of most of our suffering.

Two sharp questions followed in the chat: who decides how long a given soul stays on Earth? And if karma doesn't run on a clock, why does it still seem to play out on a delay in this physical world? One answer offered: death is simply a change of form, not an ending — and the timing is largely set at the moment of birth.

Pulled by the Future, Not Just Pushed by the Past

The host offered a sharp contrast between two schools of psychology, using a fear of public speaking as the example everyone could picture. The Freudian explanation says the fear comes from the past — maybe you were ridiculed once as a child, and the trauma stuck. Alfred Adler's theory flips this entirely: instead of being pushed by our past, we're pulled by our future goals. Maybe you unconsciously "chose" the fear of public speaking because it conveniently keeps you out of a career path you didn't actually want.

The point isn't which theory is correct — it's what it implies either way: even with the exact same past, you still have the freedom to make a completely different decision today. Nothing is stopping you except the story you keep telling yourself.

Building Destiny Forward, Rationalizing Luck Backward

One of the tidiest frameworks of the night came from a participant who split the question in two. Creating your destiny is something you do looking forward — practice piano every day, and you'll be a little better tomorrow than you are today. That's you, consciously and subconsciously, shaping what comes next. Rationalizing luck, on the other hand, is something you do looking backward — making sense of things you never chose, like the language you happened to grow up speaking.

They tied this to locus of control: some people default to believing they have real agency over their lives (an internal locus of control); others default to believing things simply happen to them (an external locus of control). Neither is universally right, but people with a stronger internal locus tend to feel — rightly or wrongly — that they have more say over their own destiny.

Thrown Into a Life We Didn't Choose

Drawing on the philosopher Martin Heidegger, one participant introduced the idea of thrownness — we are "thrown" into a world we never selected: a family, a culture, a language, a moment in history, all handed to us before we could weigh in. In this view, luck and destiny can never really be separated, because the very possibilities open to us are shaped by the circumstances we were thrown into.

Crucially, they added, this isn't an excuse to give up. Our freedom doesn't come from escaping our circumstances — it comes from how we respond to them, from inside them. And "rationalizing" the past, in this light, might not be self-deception at all — it might be how we notice the shape of a life that was quietly forming the whole time.

When Destiny Has a Divine Author

A different participant offered a Christian framing: as a matter of faith, they don't believe in luck at all — nothing happens by accident, and God is the one who shapes destiny. Humans, made in God's image, were given free will to choose between right and wrong, but the final outcome rests with God. They illustrated this with a story of two biblical rulers — one who stayed faithful and was blessed, and his descendant, who rebelled, whose kingdom was subsequently divided. The lesson offered: the path you choose shapes the blessing you receive, even while God holds the final word.

Luck as Plain Probability

Trying to nail down a working definition, one participant proposed thinking of luck as nothing more than probability. A person hits a jackpot at a casino; a sailor simply hopes for calm weather rather than rain. Can those two "lucky" outcomes even be compared on the same scale? Maybe luck is just the probability of something favourable happening wherever you happen to be standing — with no real connection to anything you did to deserve it.

Learning a New Language, Living a New Life

Returning to an earlier question about whether learning a new language can change your destiny, one participant said yes, unambiguously — research shows multilingual people display different brain connectivity, and sometimes even different personality traits, depending on which language they're speaking. Learning something like sign language, they pointed out, could open doors to entire communities and careers that didn't exist for you before. And once your understanding of the world shifts, you can't fully go back — even if you forget the specific skill, the experience leaves a mark that doesn't disappear.

This fed into a broader disagreement about whether believing in fate is always a coping mechanism. One participant pushed back hard on that framing — for some people, an assigned fate isn't comforting at all, it's something to actively fight against. They agreed it can function as comfort for someone going through hardship, but insisted that's not the whole story for everyone.

A related and genuinely tricky question came up: if your current circumstances are meant to reflect karma from a past life, how do you explain the fact that migrants from historically disadvantaged backgrounds often go on to become doctors, lawyers, or senior public figures once they move abroad? One participant admitted they found this very hard to reconcile with a strictly karma-based view of where we each start out in life.

The Comfort of Meaning, and the Cost of Chasing It

Perhaps the most philosophically dense stretch of the night came from a participant who brought in three thinkers in quick succession. From the philosopher Emil Cioran: a tension between fanaticism (forcing absolute meaning onto existence, which is energizing even when it's partly self-deceiving) and lucid absurdity (the clear-eyed acceptance that existence has no built-in justification at all). From Friedrich Nietzsche: the idea that self-deception and the stories we tell about our own lives aren't failures — they're necessary, because truly confronting the full complexity of existence at every moment would leave us paralyzed. And from Franz Kafka: the unsettling thought that there may be a higher meaning out there, one we can sense but are simply not built to fully reach.

In the chat, another participant pushed back specifically on Nietzsche's idea of amor fati — loving your fate exactly as it is, wanting nothing to be different. They argued it's natural, even healthy, to resist the parts of life you don't like, while still holding a personal belief in a divine destiny that can be actively shaped rather than simply accepted.

Is a Fuller Life Necessarily a Moderate One?

The host suggested that both extremes — forcing total meaning onto life, or deciding it has none at all — cause a person to miss out on a large part of what life offers, and that most people naturally settle somewhere in the moderate middle, the way most people live in temperate climates rather than deserts or the poles.

One participant disagreed directly: someone living at an extreme is still experiencing life fully, just from their own vantage point — it only looks "less full" from someone else's. People don't avoid Antarctica because life there is less meaningful, they avoid it because it's genuinely harder to survive. The host conceded the point partly, suggesting that staying at an extreme can actually be more comfortable than holding two conflicting ideas in your head at once — while admitting that observation itself might just be a personal bias talking.

Common Debates and Controversial Takes From the Room

A few genuine fault lines opened up over the course of the evening, worth naming directly:

Personal responsibility vs. structural luck. When one participant argued that going bankrupt is the result of taking on too much risk — "that's really your fault" — another pushed back: identical decisions produce different outcomes for different people all the time, so where's the fairness in blaming the ones who happened to land on the wrong side of the odds?
Coping mechanism or delusion? A sharp chat exchange broke out over whether believing in fate, karma, or "the universe has a plan" is a healthy coping tool or simple self-delusion. One side argued that "random" is just a word scientists use for things they haven't figured out yet, and that leaning on comforting beliefs is closer to denial than wisdom. The other side argued coping mechanisms and social support are basic, universal human tools — not inherently a weakness or a temporary fix.
Karma vs. observed social mobility. If your current life reflects karma earned over past lives, how do you explain entire immigrant communities rising dramatically in a single generation, once given the opportunity? This one was raised as a genuine, unresolved tension rather than something anyone claimed to fully answer.
Does living at an extreme shrink your life, or just look that way to outsiders? As above — a real disagreement about whether a "fuller life" is a matter of moderation, or simply a matter of perspective.
Is manipulation by algorithms a new force, or just an old one wearing a new outfit? Is a corporation quietly shaping your desires meaningfully different from a parent, a peer group, or a religion doing the same thing centuries ago — or is it something genuinely new, operating at a scale and precision we've never had to reckon with before?

A Fresh Angle to Sit With: Who's Curating Your Luck?

Here's a thread from the evening worth pulling on a little further. The classic version of the "even your hard work is luck" argument says: you never chose your temperament, your risk appetite, or your natural curiosity — so crediting yourself for "working hard" is really just luck, one level removed. That's true, and worth sitting with. But it just pushes the question of credit one level upstream, from the outcome to the character that produced it.

What's newer, and came up almost in passing tonight, is this: a growing share of what we call "chance" today isn't random at all — it's manufactured. The people you meet, the jobs you're shown, the opinions you're exposed to — all increasingly curated by systems built by companies with a financial stake in the outcome, not your flourishing. So the old question — "do I write my own destiny, or does luck?" — always had two possible authors: you, or the universe. Increasingly, there's a third, quieter author in the room: whoever designed the algorithm deciding what counts as your "luck" in the first place.

Some Questions to Sit With

A few to turn over on your own, or bring to your next dinner table — some light, some heavier:

If you had to bet, would you say you have more of an internal or external locus of control? Be honest — and ask someone who knows you well if they'd guess the same.
Think of one "lucky break" in your own life. Could that same luck have landed on literally anyone else?
Do you tend to credit your wins to effort and your losses to bad luck? Try, just once, flipping it the other way for a day.
If an algorithm is quietly deciding which people, jobs, or ideas you're even exposed to, how much of your life's "luck" is really yours anymore?
Is there a belief about fate, karma, or destiny in your own life you've never examined closely — one you just absorbed from family or culture without really testing it?
If you knew, for certain, that your effort had absolutely no bearing on the outcome, would you still try as hard as you do?

Closing Thought

As the evening wound down, one line landed with the whole room: however different our paths, our religions, our fortunes — we all share exactly the same ultimate destination. What differs is only how we walk there, and who we walk it with. Another participant tied this to memento mori — remembering that we will die — not as something morbid, but as the one fixed point that makes everything else in this conversation actually matter.

The closest thing to a group consensus, if there was one: even inside firm constraints — a body that needs sleep, a family we didn't choose, a culture we were born into — some form of freedom still survives, and it lives mostly on the inside. Not in our circumstances, but in how we choose to meet them.

Further Reading

For anyone who wants to go deeper into the ideas raised tonight:

Epictetus, The Enchiridion — the short, practical Stoic text behind the "dichotomy of control."
Martin Heidegger, on the concept of thrownness (Geworfenheit) — dense, but worth wrestling with.
Alfred Adler's individual psychology, for the teleological (goal-pulled, rather than trauma-pushed) view of behaviour, in contrast with Freud.
Emil Cioran, on the tension between fanaticism and lucid absurdity.
Friedrich Nietzsche, on self-deception, narrative, and amor fati.
Franz Kafka's shorter parables, for his sense of a meaning just out of reach.