Sometimes I think living in this world is like floating down the Mississippi River.
You didn’t choose the river. You didn’t choose the century. You didn’t choose the current speed or the industrial runoff or the barge traffic. You just opened your eyes one day and there you were — already moving.
And the river is strong.
You can swim against it. For a while. You can exhaust yourself trying to prove you’re independent of it. You can angle sideways. You can drift with it. You can dodge a branch or push away from a rock. You can grab onto someone else who’s struggling.
You have choices. But you are not turning the Mississippi around.
That tension, between real choice and undeniable direction, feels like the truest description of reality I know of. We have agency, yes. But it’s not unbounded. We have freedom, yes. But it’s relative.
We don’t get to choose the macro currents. The economy. The technological changes. The cultural narratives that shaped us before we even knew what narratives were. We are born midstream.
And yet.
What we do in the water still matters.
We can panic. Or we can calm down and learn to swim — with purpose.
We can flail wildly against the current until we sink. Or we can learn its patterns and conserve strength. We can pretend the river isn’t carrying us anywhere. Or we can admit that it is; and focus on how we travel rather than where we’re ultimately headed.
That’s what personal responsibility means, ultimately.
There’s an old debate about free will and predestination, as if it’s an either/or question. But maybe it’s more like this river. The direction might be larger than us. History has momentum. Systems have gravity. Entropy is real. Even scripture hints at currents beyond human comprehension.
But character? That’s chosen in the water. By each person.
You can’t stop the flow of technological acceleration. But you can decide whether you become consumed by it or disciplined within it. You can’t halt economic tides alone. But you can choose whether you live extractively or responsibly. You can’t prevent the cultural drift toward distraction. But you can choose attention.
Those are not small things.
Sometimes people hear this kind of thinking and assume it’s fatalism. It’s not. Fatalism says nothing matters. This says what matters is different than we thought.
You may not redirect the river by yourself. But you can build a raft with others.
You can create small eddies of sanity. You can form communities that move with intention rather than panic. And when enough people gather, sometimes rivers do shift — slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, but they shift nonetheless.
And, even if the destination is fixed, the manner of traveling is not.
Will we arrive bitter? Exhausted? Angry at the current? Or steady, purposeful, having helped others along the way?
Maybe negotiated freedom (if I can borrow a fancy phrase) is just this: recognizing that we are carried, but not controlled; constrained, but not helpless; embedded, but not hopelessly so.
We are in the river, undoubtedly.
At this point, the question is not where we’re going.
The question is how we swim.