Do You Believe in Fate, or Is It All Choice?

Exploring Whether Our Lives Are Driven by Fate and Destiny or Shaped by the Choices We Make.

Can you look back at your life and sometimes wonder whether certain moments happened because they were simply fate? Maybe it was meeting someone unexpectedly, getting a job you never imagined you would, or experiencing a loss that changed the course of your life. It is tempting to believe that some of these moments were predestined.

But does fate exist, or are our minds simply searching for meaning in what happens to us? And if some things are beyond our control, what does that mean for our choices and free will? Does destiny shape our lives, or are they ultimately determined by the choices we make every day?

Fate

We often ask whether life is guided by fate or by choice, as though one must cancel out the other. We speak of people who were "meant to meet," careers that were "meant to happen," and tragedies that were "meant to teach us something." Yet every day, our lives are also shaped by hundreds of ordinary decisions that rarely feel destined at all.

Psychology offers one explanation. Research suggests that people are more likely to invoke fate when faced with difficult decisions, uncertainty, or stressful life events. Believing that something was meant to happen can provide comfort, reduce regret, and help us make sense of experiences beyond our control. In contrast, positive outcomes are more often attributed to our own effort and choices.

When the outcome is uncertain, believing that fate has a role in what happens can make difficult decisions easier to live with because we feel less responsible if things go wrong. Research suggests that the more difficult the choice, the more likely people are to believe in fate.

Of course, some aspects of our lives are completely outside our locus of control. We do not choose our parents, our siblings, or the genetic conditions we may be born with. Whether we call those things luck or fate often depends on how we make sense of them. But when people talk about fate, they are rarely referring to those things. More often, they are trying to understand why certain events happened and what, if any, meaning they hold.

It's not only about the choices we make. We also look back at the events in our lives and attribute them to either luck when the outcome is positive or fate when it isn't. I know I have done that myself. There have been times when something good happened, and my first thought was, I am so lucky this happened.

I have a friend who struggled to conceive. She lived in Canada but often stayed at my house because both her office and her doctor were in Troy, Michigan. She found out she was pregnant through IVF while she was staying with me. Later, while we were sitting together in my living room, she received another call from her doctor telling her there were no genetic abnormalities and revealing the sex of the baby. She once said to me, "You are lucky for me. I always seem to be with you whenever I get good news or something wonderful happens."

Looking back, I realized that my husband and I had also hosted her wedding in 2018. Her pre-wedding party was at our house, and even the food tasting for the wedding took place there. She was the older sister of my husband's childhood best friend. I had nothing to do with any of those events. Yet she found meaning in the pattern. "It must be my fate to have met you," she said.

Since then, I have often joked that I bring people luck whenever they receive good news while I am around. I don't actually believe that's true, but people are often surprisingly quick to accept the idea. It reminds us how naturally we look for meaning and patterns, even when they may simply be coincidences.

But what about the negative outcomes? My children's father died suddenly at the age of 45 in the middle of a work phone call. The person on the other end thought the call had simply dropped, when in reality, he had collapsed. I spoke with his doctor because I needed answers. After reviewing the autopsy report, she told me it was sudden heart failure. She believed he had likely lost consciousness before he died and probably did not suffer, unlike someone experiencing a typical heart attack. Passing away at such a young age, was that fate? Was it meant to happen?

After his death, I heard people say he must have done good in this life, or in a previous one, to have been granted such a quick and painless death. Others called it good karma. But was it really? Or were they, like so many of us, trying to find meaning in something that felt impossible to understand or accept?

It was unfortunate and tragic. But the likelihood of it happening wasn't infinitesimal. In all probability, it was coming. So, was it fate, karma, or some unknown predestined event? That brings us to the choices we make in our lives and how they influence every aspect of how our lives unfold.

Choice

Many people believe that the stars somehow determine the course of our lives, not just fate. They believe astrology can predict what will happen based on the positions of the planets at the time of our birth, as though millions of people with similar birth charts are destined to live similar lives. It is neither scientific nor provable. Yet millions of people around the world, particularly in India, believe in Vedic astrology.

I remember my parents trying to match my horoscope with those of prospective grooms when they were trying to arrange my marriage in India. I was twenty-one or twenty-two at the time, and I always thought it was one of the most ridiculous things I had ever heard.

I have friends who believe in Tarot, and I've indulged in it occasionally for fun. But ultimately, I believe the most reliable predictor of the future is the actions we take and the choices we make. Not the stars. Not birth charts. Not fate. Not destiny.

When things didn't go so well in my marriage, it would have been easy to believe it was fate or, as many Hindus believe, karma from a previous life that I was meant to experience. Believing that would have made it easier to accept what had happened because it meant I had no choice in the matter and that everything had been predetermined before I was born. It would have been much easier than accepting that my life had been shaped by choices, both mine and other people's. But the truth is, I did have a choice.

I couldn't choose everything that happened to me, but I could choose how I responded, what I accepted, and whether I stayed or walked away. Looking back, I realize that some parts of my story were shaped by circumstances beyond my control, while others were shaped by the choices I made. What was beyond my control was often within someone else's control. The circumstances I experienced were sometimes the result of choices made by other people, just as my own choices undoubtedly shaped someone else's life.

I'm not suggesting that everything that happens in life is the result of our own choices. Rather, I believe life is an intricate web of countless choices made by countless people. Those choices intersect in ways we can never fully anticipate, and the culmination of those intersections is what ultimately shapes our lives. What we often think of as fate is, at least in part, the intersection of our choices with those of others.

For instance, if you unexpectedly meet someone in a coffee shop and instantly hit it off, was it fate that brought you together? Or was it the countless choices the two of you made that day? Perhaps you stopped because you were sleepy after a long drive and wanted a cup of coffee before heading home. Perhaps they stopped because the Starbucks was quieter than their busy house and they wanted a peaceful place to work on a project. Neither of you planned to meet the other, yet your independent choices intersected at that exact moment.

Where Fate Meets Choice

Perhaps fate, if it exists, gave me the family I was born into. I had educated parents who valued learning, encouraged curiosity, and provided a financially stable home. I did nothing to earn those advantages. They became the foundation upon which many of my later choices were built. But what I chose to do with those opportunities was up to me. Someone else born into the same family could have made very different choices and lived a very different life. The foundation may have been given to me, but the life I built upon it was not.

Now, coming back to the death of my children's father, was it fate, or was it the culmination of choices made over a lifetime? Lifestyle choices, eating habits, lack of physical activity, excessive smoking, and taking on life stresses that were often the result of his own decisions were likely some of the factors that ultimately led to his untimely death.

At the same time, there were factors beyond his control. He was genetically predisposed to diabetes, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure. Those were not choices. They were part of his biology. However, he also knew he had these conditions and had already been diagnosed. The choices he made after those diagnoses became part of the story as well. When his genetic predisposition combined with the choices he made over the course of his life, it ultimately led to what happened.

Maybe that is where fate and choice coexist. We do not choose our genetics, the family we are born into, or many of the circumstances life gives us. But we do make choices that influence how those circumstances unfold. In the end, our lives are shaped by the constant interaction between what is given to us and what we choose to do with it.

I don't believe our lives are written before we are born, nor do I believe we have complete control over everything that happens to us. We are all shaped by circumstances we never chose, our families, our genetics, the opportunities we are given, and the hardships we face. Yet within those circumstances, we make choices. Other people make choices. Those choices intersect with ours in ways we could never have predicted, gradually shaping the lives we eventually look back on.

So, do I believe in fate? Only in the sense that none of us chooses where our story begins. But I believe the chapters that follow are written one decision at a time, by us and by everyone whose lives cross ours. Maybe what we call fate is simply the name we give to the countless intersections of choices that brought us to this very moment.