Perfectly said

The lack of free will is definitely a bitter pill to swallow, but it is a necessary one and it seems to me that people have to do mental gymnastics to assert there’s any semblance of it out there. But importantly, it’s not the same as personal agency, which is still real and worth cultivating.

Someone had a good phrase about this, along the lines of “you’re free to do what you want, but you’re not free to choose what you want” which I think encapsulates the difference; the first part of the phrase confirms we have personal agency, and the second part of the phrase confirms our lack of free will.

In The Sundays of Jean Dézert, the main character Jean spends his whole life being utterly unremarkable and average, doing the same routine of deadend job day in and day out. The first and only substantial thing in his life occurs during the book, which is meeting and proposing to a woman, only for her to very quickly after agreeing wonder what she was thinking and call it off. As he’s walking home from the failure of the first and only meaningful event in his life, this passage occurs:

Two barges are moored next to each another, bow to bow. A length of rope occasionally creaks. “How well, I understand you, barges,” thinks Jean Dézert. “You spend your rectilinear existence in these narrow canals. You wait in front of the locks. You cross through cities, pulled under bridges by tugboats that loudly proclaim their pride at owning a siren like real ships. All in all, you resemble me. You’ll never get to the sea.”

The idea of ‘never getting to the sea’ really encapsulated some of the feelings I’ve had in down periods of my life.