What are your thoughts on fate/destiny ?

"Fate" is a fancy way of saying "hindsight is 20/20". What happened was the only thing that could ever happen.

Can be a fun trope in fiction. Doesn't exist IRL, which is a good thing.

It is a heap of horseshit that people make up to comfort themselves.

Like potential it doesn’t mean a damn thing.

I think it's appropriate that the anglo-saxon word for fate, wyrd, is retained in English as the word "weird," because it seems folks only really turn to destiny as an explanation when something seems kinda strange and they don't have another explanation.

don't believe in it any more than ghosts, god, or goblins.

Things in the past are destined to be. Funny how that doesn't work with the present.

A future leader of humanity will have said once:

No fate but what we make for ourselves.

No such thing, beyond what we ourselves choose to do and what others do to/for us. Chaos rules the day, I’m afraid.

The past and the future are both malleable, and the present impossible to accurately perceive.

I don't think about either, I work on staying in the moment.

Fate is an anthropomorphization of the sum of things that happen in the universe. Does it exist? It exists the same way the universe exists. Can it be known or understood? Partially, maybe more completely if we discover a coherent Theory of Everything. Does it have a will? Not in the way that we generally think of will, but it contains the sum of all wills in the universe, and there are sometimes local convergences of minds that produce emergent effects that feel like more than random noise, because they are.

Is it a useful concept? I think it's a prototype tool our ancestors came up with for framing cosmic cause and effect, which is useful in some circumstances. I think it's too crude a tool, and it's more useful to think about cause and effect more locally because most of the time, local effects dominate outcomes and when they don't, it's extremely difficult to make useful inferences about outcomes because we can't really think about the whole universe all at once. That's why invocations of fate are usually associated with throwing up one's hands in despair and/or accepting whatever Fate has thrown at you.

Fate is a (non-comprehensive) model of the entire universe. The universe is chaotic and complicated, full of exceptions and apparent contradictions. It is, as far as I know, impossible to predict. That's why simpler models are helpful, even if they are incomplete representations of the universe, because they allow us to select the most influential factors of the universe and study them in isolation. Fate is overwhelming in scope, and we usually feel helpless in the face of such cosmic forces. It deters us from action.

I could go on, I think Fate as a concept, how we use it to influence ourselves and each other, is enormously fascinating and important to how humans make decisions in their lives. But I think I've hit a natural stopping point and to go on would grow too repetitive without more careful editing.

Destiny is what we call the story we tell to explain chance. It is only ever used once someone achieves something and never to enable a person to start their journey.

Seems like comforting nonsense, or possibly just nonsense. If something goes to hell, you can tell yourself that it was "fated" to happen that way, instead of examining the actual reasons and possibly discovering you were at fault.

Fate/destiny is nothing more than the intersections of the choices that we make that affect each other. It’s what you call it when what happens to you is out of your control and you cannot freely choose your way out of it. For example, you choose to get in my car and I choose to drive you somewhere. My free choice on where to go and how fast becomes your fate. You are fated to exist because two people chose to fuck. Scale that relationship to encompass a society and the complex ways in which we make choices, and it becomes evident that free will and fate/destiny are two sides of the same coin.

The future doesn't exist until we get there, so you have nothing tying you to any path that you can't change. Abstractly you could see your situation like a fate or destiny if you can't control some things. But the future is still unwritten, and even walls holding you in now can be passed later by your actions or just circumstance.

Great concepts in games and fantasy. Give me goosebumps. 😁

In reality, there is nothing but cosmic coincidence, human action and inaction and the effects thereof. 🫠

I've seen bad men do good things, good men do bad things. Whether you end up in heaven or hell isn't god's plan, it's yours. You just have to remember what it was.

Clancy Brown, Cowboys and Aliens

it's something irresponsible people need to believe in because that way they don't have to take blame for their own choices.

you will notice the types of folks who believe in this stuff tend have life histories of responsibility avoidance.

Well, I've seen Fate/Stay Night and Fate/Zero and a few of the other spin offs but I've kind of lost track of the Fate/Word Salad series at this point... 🙃️