You may remember my friend, whom I mentioned in the section on beliefs. During the time when she was heavily consuming alcohol, I had an interesting conversation with her about her illnesses. My friend believed that the root of all diseases somehow traced back to our behaviors and choices in life. You might think to yourself, what’s wrong with thinking like that? Or maybe you even agree with her. I don’t deny that our minds can impact our bodies and that many diseases have mental origins, but attributing everything to supernatural forces is highly irrational.

As someone who was closely observing my friend’s life, I found this thought process quite dangerous. She believed her stomach issues and fatty liver were due to her jealousy of other women, her depression was caused by non-organic entities that had possessed her soul, and the various pandemics, including COVID, were the result of our collective sins. Later, after an Ayahuasca experience, she told me that during her trip, it was revealed to her that she was the cause of the COVID virus! I found that idea amusing since it would make a perfect plot for my next fiction novel.

From my perspective, the issue with this kind of thinking is that instead of attributing her liver problem to her constant drinking and cannabis use, her stomach issues to eating greasy fried chicken from KFC after a party, or her depression to the combination of constant insomnia and lack of sunlight, she saw these problems as the result of her jealousy towards other women on social media, rejecting the advances of men who wanted to have one-night stands with her, or her disregard for the stray cat on the street corner.

When I was heading out of the house to go for a run and watch the sunrise, she was just returning home from a party, and we’d often joke about how we’d make a great team for museum shifts. She usually slept until the afternoon, and by the time she woke up and shook off her hangover, the sun had already set. The constant use of alcohol and drugs, lack of physical activity, no exposure to sunlight, unhealthy diet, and the nonsense fed to her by life coaches and pseudo-spiritual courses formed a terrifying mix that drowned her in depression and anxiety. Meanwhile, her esteemed life coach’s solution was to rid her of non-organic entities by invoking spirits and other such absurdities.

I told her, “Don’t you think illness is a natural phenomenon? Not just humans, but all animals and even plants get sick, and some are even born with defects. Does that mean that if Dexter, my loyal dog, got sick, it was because he was jealous of the neighbor’s dog or disobeyed my orders? And if my houseplants wilted, was it because they did something wrong, rather than me forgetting to water them on time?”

She responded, “Not at all. Dexter and your plants were probably humans in their past lives and committed wrongs for which they are now paying the karmic price.”

I preferred to smile and nod rather than argue further, realizing that the conversation was going nowhere. I began to ponder why we humans, instead of accepting that illness, defects, and death are natural parts of life, feel the need to craft these fantastical stories to avoid facing the realities of nature. Instead of trying to live healthy lives and treat our emotions as warning signals and develop an efficient value system to fully enjoy life, we suppress them and blame our anger, jealousy, and behaviors for our problems.

The answer to this question is complex and requires careful consideration throughout this book. My friend’s beliefs were a mixture of everything she had heard: Christian notions of divine justice, reincarnation and karma stories that offered an appealing alternative to the meaningless concepts of heaven and hell, and tales of non-organic entities and demons that bombarded her mind with this nonsense. On one hand, her lifestyle exacerbated her pain, and on the other, these ideas promised her a life without suffering, selling her the illusion of happiness. First-semester economics basics: supply and demand!

These kinds of thoughts make us believe that even the most natural phenomena, such as floods, earthquakes, and global warming, are divine punishments. Instead of improving water drainage systems, building stronger houses, or addressing overconsumption—tasks that are certainly much more challenging—we narcissistically believe that we are the center of the universe, and all these events revolve around us as a consequence of our actions.

Much of this kind of thinking stems from different myths we’ve been told since childhood, which we tend to internalize rather than viewing as mere legends. Changing these ingrained beliefs, even if we want to, is an exhausting task. Other parts of this mentality come from inherited factors, environmental influences, family, society, and childhood traumas.

The point is that when we change our beliefs and value systems, we don’t just format them like a disk or Flash memory from past decades. The brain doesn’t work like that. On the contrary, replacing one belief or value system with a new one requires a lot of time for the neural connections to change and for new, stronger neural connections to form. This takes far more time than we often think, yet we assume we can simply erase one belief and overwrite it with another. You’ll be able to explore the brain’s belief storage mechanisms in more detail in the concluding sections of the book.

Now let’s take a closer look at my friend’s behavior. I intentionally placed this topic here, after the section on free will, to address the strange question: If my dear friend has no free will over her choices and behaviors, how can she take responsibility for her life and make steps toward healing and solving her problems? Let’s start with her childhood—actually, before that, when she was just a fetus in her mother’s womb.

As far as I know, her mother was an alcoholic and a smoker, and she continued to drink and smoke during her pregnancy. Did alcohol and cigarettes cause my friend’s problems? No! Alcohol and cigarettes alone don’t cause these issues, but they can predispose someone. In addition, people who abuse alcohol tend to have poor diets, especially after drinking, but I don’t think I need to explain that, as it’s not relevant to this book. Did a poor diet cause these problems? Again, no! But it is one of the hundreds of contributing factors that I will outline. Now let’s go back further—to my friend’s mother. Why do you think she became an alcoholic and a smoker? The answer isn’t simple, but it likely involves hundreds of factors, which I refer to as “mental preconditions,” and they include genetics. Genetics can’t solely determine alcoholism or smoking, but they can make someone more susceptible to repeated alcohol use or nicotine addiction. Unhealthy lifestyle choices and environment can alter gene expression, and some traits might even be passed to the next generation. This means that, in addition to alcohol and smoking during pregnancy, many other behaviors and decisions could have impacted my friend’s life. There’s also a chance that her predisposition was inherited, though calculating the exact correlation is still beyond our scientific reach.

Alcoholic mothers tend to be more neglectful than others. All I know about my friend’s upbringing is that her mother often left her alone at home, to the point where the situation escalated to court involvement.

Her father worked long hours, rarely spending time with the family, and when he was home, he was very aggressive. He physically abused her multiple times, including burning her with a cigarette butt, before eventually abandoning the family without explanation.

Not only did she have to cope with the trauma of her father’s abuse, but she also had to endure the rest of her life with a neglectful alcoholic mother.

She had her first sexual experience at the age of fourteen with a fifty-year-old man, which left her hating all men.

Having failed to finish high school, she started working at a hotel at eighteen to support her ill mother, enduring the disrespect of her awful boss, inappropriate advances, and sexual harassment from hotel guests. Her exposure to bleach and other harsh chemicals also led to asthma and skin diseases.

I don’t want to delve too deeply into her story, but by now, you can probably understand some of the reasons behind her choices. Words cannot fully describe what she has been through over the years.

As a child, I developed panic attacks whenever I heard sirens, and it was only after years of therapy that I realized this trauma stemmed from the bombings during the war in my city. It took a long time to manage my panic attacks and teach my dear amygdala that an ambulance or fire truck siren isn’t the red alert of war. Remember the German Shepherd example and the car accident story in the section on expectation errors and trauma.

For more information about the amygdala, check the relevant section at the end of the book. But, in brief, the amygdala is part of the limbic system, and its main functions include fight, flight, and freeze. Unresolved traumas that lead to PTSD often cause hyperactivity in this small yet crucial brain region. Those who have experienced amygdala dysfunction, or have had it surgically removed for any reason, typically do not experience fear and often engage in reckless behaviors. On the other hand, amygdala hypoactivity can lead to reduced emotional responses, unusual risk-taking behaviors, and overly logical, empathy-lacking decisions, which you can read about in detail at the end of the book.

The surge of stress hormones like cortisol can cause momentary amygdala hyperactivity, which explains why our decision-making becomes distorted under pressure and chronic anxiety. I will discuss stress at length in a separate section.

Though I speak about these topics, I myself haven’t been able to resolve my own traumas so easily. Awareness of our traumas and understanding how the brain and nervous system work doesn’t mean we’ve dealt with or resolved our trauma or PTSD. It’s merely the first step in a long and painful journey of healing.

Now, imagine the reaction my friend has when she sees a man with a cigarette. Worse still, imagine how she felt when her cherished Indian guru, whom she saw as a savior, assaulted her, justifying it by saying that those who experienced childhood sexual abuse need to face it again to conquer their trauma! What a “creative” idea.

You might wonder, given that her mother was an alcoholic, how could my friend follow the same path? This is precisely the issue of trauma that I discussed earlier. Even if we look into her father’s life, we’ll likely discover that he, too, was a victim of his own father’s abuse, perpetuating this vicious cycle. He, too, followed in his mother’s footsteps. If we examine closely, we might find similar flawed patterns, albeit to a lesser extent, in our own behaviors.

After her mother’s death, my friend immediately emigrated to another country, where she met a guy who introduced her to several computer skills courses. After a while, she found an online job and became a freelancer. A few years later, after saving up some money, she decided to move to Portugal.

Throughout all of these life events, I see no trace of free will but rather a series of events that were imposed on her without any choice. I’ve already told you the rest of the story—how she got involved with Instagram life coaches, traveled to India, and ventured into the Amazon rainforest.

Now, the next question is: Did the people who caused these traumas in my friend’s life, from her parents to the Indian guru, really have the will to change their behaviors? Again, the answer is complex.

Let’s imagine the hypothetical life of the Indian guru, and you’ll find many similar stories if you search for them. He may have been born in extreme poverty in an Indian village, experiencing continuous trauma throughout his life, from malnutrition to poor sanitation, and witnessing severe economic inequality and sexual abuse. Now, don’t get me wrong; figures like Gandhi also came from the same society.

What makes one person become Gandhi and another become Osho are precisely the factors I keep repeating in this book: preconditions, preconditions, preconditions! I reiterate that I’m not trying to categorize these two people as good and bad or angels and demons but rather to analyze the stark differences in their approaches, despite their similarities.

Genetics, environment, society, family outlook, brain and nervous system function, hormones, coincidences, and fuzzy logic—all these factors and more create a multi-dimensional matrix, the repetition of which might start to annoy or exhaust you. But let’s move on!

Let’s return to the example of the guru. After a life of deprivation and hardship, he suddenly finds himself at the center of attention from Westerners, and his creative ideas start to make him an enormous amount of money. He then relocates to a free country like the U.S., and the rest of the story can be seen in the Osho documentary.

He is a human being just like you and me, and it’s unrealistic to expect him to live up to everything he says—just like us!

Could the Indian guru have acted differently? The answer is complex. If, and only if, hundreds of other factors like family, society, the people he met, and various random events had been different—all of which are beyond our control.

If you think I consistently live up to everything I believe in and have set as my values, you are greatly mistaken. All it takes is a little stress and the onset of seasonal depression for my brain’s functioning to be completely altered and for the harmony of my internal personalities to be disrupted, just as I mentioned in the section on expectation errors. That’s why I’ve explained that wisdom requires constant mistakes and corrections throughout life, even up until our final days. If, every time you make a foolish mistake, you feel terrible and beat yourself up, it’s perfectly natural, and you’re on the right track. If you didn’t feel bad, you’d continue the same behavior forever. The key is understanding that this doesn’t mean you are inadequate or that you need to change who you are. On the contrary, you are enough, and you must accept yourself as you are. But if one of your many personalities surfaces under stress, and you don’t want this side of you to come out, instead of trying in vain to change or eliminate it (which is practically impossible), the simpler approach is to learn new skills to manage the situation.

I’ve briefly outlined my own management strategy in the expectation error section: the balance cycle. If living in a crowded, traffic-heavy city increases my stress levels, I move to a village or suburb surrounded by nature. If my job is stressful and filled with challenges that make me irritable, instead of taking medication, I change my job! If my partner and I constantly clash due to cultural or ideological differences, I change my partner. The environment impacts us far more than we think. If reading the news or scrolling through useless social media leaves me anxious and disrupts my sleep, I cut out social media and limit my news consumption to only the most essential and relevant topics.

These are my own solutions, and everyone needs to come up with their own methods, drawing inspiration from others and tailoring it to their needs.

Did I learn all of these strategies from birth and choose them with strong willpower? No, most of them were learned by accident—from books, podcasts, and random people I met, some of whom I’ll describe in more detail in future sections.

Even with all this, there are still situations that leave me confused, frustrated, and lead to decisions I later regret—even if it’s simply overeating at a friend’s house. I know full well that overeating, especially at night, will disrupt my sleep and make me feel terrible the next day, but since there’s no Iranian restaurant in the city where I live, if you invite me to your house for a tempting meal like ghormeh sabzi, I’ll definitely lose my mind.

Ghormeh sabzi is just an example, and I’m sure you can apply it to hundreds of different situations.

Let’s return to my friend’s story and examine the question of responsibility and justice. How could she reconcile all the misfortunes she’s faced since childhood, given that she was taught from a young age that life is fair and that everything happens for a reason? Promises of cosmic justice after death seemed meaningless and empty to her, yet she couldn’t accept that life isn’t fair, and that this was just another empty promise adults had told us since childhood—a confrontation with the reality of life and a severe expectation error! The easiest solution may have seemed to embrace ideas like reincarnation: surely, in a past life, I did something horrible, and now I’m paying for it with my karma, which means I deserve this life. While this way of thinking made her feel a bit better and soothed some of the pain caused by inequality, it only worked for a short while.

Now we reach the crucial part. With all of this in mind—that free will doesn’t exist and that genetics, life traumas, bad parents, sexual abuse, an awful boss, and more caused all these problems—could she have made better decisions from the start? Could she have lived her life differently, avoiding alcohol, rejecting life coaches, dismissing superstitions, and leading a different lifestyle? As you can guess, the answer is complicated.

If free will doesn’t exist, how could she have chosen a different path? Could her life have turned out differently? If the 50-year-old man hadn’t deceived her and assaulted her, and instead, she had met a kind man who helped her, would everything have changed? If her father had reformed after she was born and her mother had stopped drinking, could all of these events have been avoided? But are these things within our control? Again, the answer is no.

Let’s not look too far. Do you think I chose of my own free will to write this book or start an educational charity for free collective learning and social responsibility? No, that’s not the case. All the stories I’ve told you, and thousands more that I don’t have time to share, contributed to this decision! Yes, you heard me right—it wasn’t my decision; it was made by whom? By no one. By the flowing stream of life, full of randomness! Our brains are wired to assign an agent to everything, but this way of thinking oversimplifies the nature of the universe. That’s why we constantly search for an agent, whether it be a divine force, the universe, or Mother Earth!

The fact that you’re reading or listening to this book and that it may change the course of your life is the result of not thousands, but millions or billions of interconnected events. If my wonderful colleagues hadn’t supported my ideas, I wouldn’t have been able to write this book. If it weren’t for the books I read, the podcasts I listened to, or the people I met in my life, I wouldn’t have been able to write a single line of this book or my previous ones. Even without the encouragement of my family, friends, readers, and listeners, I probably wouldn’t have continued my work. Everything we are and everything we do is not only beyond our control but also the result of everything that has happened in the past, dating back to the dawn of time.

So how can I mercilessly say that my friend must take responsibility for her life?

It’s true that society is responsible for providing education, healthcare, and proper legislation. But who exactly is society? Is society or the government a person who can do all this for us?

No!

Society is made up of individuals, each of whom has likely had a winding life story, just like us. Do you think that the leaders of countries or those in positions of power are entirely healthy and haven’t experienced similar events in their lives? Certainly, many of us have endured misfortunes, not to mention the mental health conditions that severely affect our well-being.

Now, what happens if each of these individuals doesn’t learn to take responsibility for their own lives?

Let’s consider the opposite: What if no one took responsibility for their lives? Then who would be responsible for everything? Should we all wait for some mystical force to come to our rescue?

We humans are interconnected, like links in a chain, and each of our decisions and ideas has the potential to change the lives of millions. If I didn’t believe in this, I would never have written this book. I firmly believe that if my friend had access to a counselor or therapist during high school, her life could have taken a different path. If she had encountered people who genuinely wanted to help her instead of con artists, her life would have changed. This means that each of us is responsible, not only for our own lives but also for the lives of others. Don’t misunderstand me—by being responsible, I don’t mean that I should be held accountable for others’ decisions or be punished for them, but rather that I should empathize with them and take small steps to help break these harmful cycles in whatever way I can.

To understand compassionate responsibility, imagine you’re walking down the street, and a car hits a child. Our reactions are usually involuntary and deeply empathetic. We usually run to the child or freeze in place. Both of these involuntary responses are rooted in empathy, meaning that you experienced the child’s pain to some degree and instinctively rushed to help. Even if you freeze, that’s still a reaction to the pain you felt. If you simply continued walking without any particular feeling, it doesn’t mean you’re a cold-hearted, psychopathic jerk. It might just mean, like my friend’s father, that you need a good therapist to closely examine your brain function and determine if there’s a trauma or neural dysfunction in your life.

Now, if you’re sitting on a bus and a pregnant woman gets on, but you don’t give up your seat, do you still need a therapist? Maybe, but I think you need more of an education.

What if you’re smoking a cigarette at a bus stop and justify it by saying the smoke disappears in the open air and doesn’t bother anyone?

In this case, I’d definitely say your education has failed. And if tomorrow a new campaign begins, saying, “Hashtag Smoking At Bus Stops Makes You A Jerk,” and people start filming those who smoke at bus stops, shaming them, and CCTV cameras automatically snap pictures of people smoking at bus stops and fine them, I bet your behavior would change very quickly.