No one can resist the sense of fate — especially in all kinds of literary and artistic works, where every story seems destined for separation, life and death, and reunions that dissolve like a dream. It’s like the “destiny poems” in Dream of the Red Chamber — with a few strokes, an entire lifetime is sealed. This sense of fate is practically every Chinese fangirl’s favorite theme.
Yet fate itself is far from a simple concept. The original meaning of destiny in Chinese refers to the idea that the stars move according to divine command — that celestial bodies follow fixed paths determining fortune and misfortune among people. It emphasizes the natural order and its unchangeable nature — everything in the world is governed by predetermined, irresistible laws.
What most of us understand as “fate” today, however, is closer to the Western concept of fatalism. Fatalism claims that everything in life — life and death, wealth and poverty, fortune and misfortune — is preordained and unchangeable. It argues that all events and changes are determined by an external or supernatural force, rendering human free will meaningless.
Donald C. Williams’s four-dimensional realism supports this idea: if time is simply another dimension, then past, present, and future all exist equally and eternally. Philosopher Richard Taylor went further — if the past, present, and future all exist, then the future is as real as the past.
Fascinating, isn’t it? As if fate is a loop — perhaps a Möbius strip humans can never escape. But the trouble is, fatalism can neither be proven nor disproven.
People often use chance and free will to refute fatalism, yet no one can truly prove that what we call “chance” or “free will” isn’t itself part of fate — something dictated by laws beyond our understanding. If fate truly exists, perhaps it also dooms us never to fully comprehend it.
People often ask me: What if humans really don’t have free will? We love stories with a strong sense of destiny, but we’re also terrified that our own lives might just be part of some higher-dimensional being’s novel — a few casual sentences determining a lifetime. My answer -- So what. I can’t exactly punch the author outside the book, and I’m not the tragic protagonist either. Believing in free will doesn’t change much. If fate truly exists, it’s not as if a thunderbolt will strike me down for thinking otherwise. And if it did, I’d probably laugh at how petty that would be.
But ultimately, the existence of fate remains uncertain. Buddhism teaches that every being has past lives, endlessly reincarnating — hence the term “density.” One’s deeds shape one’s future, linking fate with karma. If fate and cause-and-effect are bound together, then perhaps fate must exist — every cause inevitably produces its effect, and every life follows its traceable path. Yet all of this depends on the law of causality being true. If causality itself collapses, then so does everything we know — and we still can’t prove that fate doesn’t exist.
So what then? Maybe we’ll never know. Perhaps this very unknowability is humanity’s fate — something unbreakable, unknowable, and ultimately unchangeable even if uncovered. It sounds pessimistic, but maybe that’s just life. When things go well, we deny fate; when they don’t, we blame it. Fate seems to exist and not exist at the same time — a kind of quantum superposition. Well, whatever. If my destiny really is decided by some unknowable force, then at least give me a fate with a killer soundtrack — absolutly, I will be obsessed with that.
