I have been thinking a lot about the way people talk about free will in spiritual spaces, especially around tarot, astrology, manifestation, and predictive work. There is this very popular idea that nothing is ever fixed, every outcome is endlessly negotiable, and if you simply make the right choices, manifest hard enough, or “shift timelines,” you can rewrite absolutely anything.
I do not buy that.
I believe in free will, but I think we have inflated it into something almost absurd. Free will does not mean we control every outcome. It means we have choices inside circumstances, and sometimes those circumstances are already moving in a direction we cannot completely reverse. There are things we can prevent, things we can delay, things we can soften, and things we can only prepare ourselves to meet.
This becomes especially interesting when we talk about divination. People often get very uncomfortable when a tarot reading suggests an ending, a loss, a breakup, a career change, or some other outcome they do not want. Suddenly everyone wants to invoke “free will” as though those two words function like a cosmic appeal court. But if another person has already made a decision, if a company is already preparing layoffs, or if ten years of choices have created a particular consequence, how much freedom is actually left in that moment?
That does not make divination fatalistic. I actually think it makes divination more useful.
A forecast does not have to stop the storm to be valuable. Sometimes the entire purpose of knowing what is coming is that you can prepare for it differently. You can leave earlier. You can save money. You can stop fighting something that has already ended. You can make a better decision while there is still enough room to make one.
And this is where my argument gets a little uncomfortable, because I think some of modern manifestation culture has confused empowerment with omnipotence. There is a difference between believing our choices matter and believing we personally control every variable in existence. The first idea is empowering. The second eventually becomes cruel, because it implies every loss, illness, betrayal, or disaster must somehow be the result of somebody failing to think positively enough.
I wrote a longer essay about this because I wanted to dig into the part we usually avoid: what if free will is not always the steering wheel? What if sometimes it is the brake, the gas pedal, the detour, or simply the decision to stop driving straight into the wall?
And perhaps that is what predictive divination is actually doing. It is not taking away our agency. It is showing us where our agency still exists.
I explore the full argument in my latest Medium essay, including why I think fate and free will can coexist, how momentum creates seemingly “fixed” outcomes, and why knowing what is coming can still change everything even when it cannot change the final destination.
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