The distinction seems simple at first. Fate may decide where you arrive; free will decides how you get there, which side of the vehicle you sit on, whether you get off early and take a detour into something more stimulating. But when you finally reach the destination, the fruit that was supposed to be waiting for you may already have been picked by someone else—or it may not be ripe yet. That is the whole business of timing, place, and human alignment.
The unbearable question in Arrival
Arrival pushes this question to a cruel extreme: if you know the ending is fixed—even tragic—do you still choose to go through with it? In the film, the protagonist discovers that her visions are not fantasies but future facts. She knows that the short time she will have with her daughter will end with the child’s illness and early death. Does she choose that road? Or does she have no choice at all?
Real life offers smaller versions of the same problem. Someone who visits a fortune teller may be told that the relationship they are in is not their destined partner, that it will certainly end at some point. Should they keep loving that person anyway? Or suppose you realize that effort does not guarantee a result. Do you still make the effort? Or do you refuse to start unless you can know in advance that your effort will produce success in the worldly sense—calling it a way to avoid wasting time?
Faced with the ultimate question in Arrival, most of us would probably force ourselves into a rational, utilitarian analysis of pros and cons. At least we would not act impulsively on the belief that we can change fate. This also explains why people are so drawn to the story of a rake who reforms: only such a story seems to prove that we can fight fate, that we can redeem someone who was supposedly beyond saving.
In Arrival, love is expressed as something radically non-rational. It does not need explanation or a cost-benefit calculation. The protagonist could certainly choose not to fall in love with the physicist, not to marry him, not to have their daughter. She chooses that path anyway. And depending on where you stand, you will judge her choice as right or wrong.
This is what Heidegger meant by being-toward-death. Everything that exists is oriented toward death. A human life ends; relationships end; money runs out; desire has limits; societies collapse; systems break down; nature mutates. If every ending is fixed, what are we actually pursuing?
Being-toward-death addresses the part of the question that traps people most easily: is there really such a thing as good or bad, right or wrong? If everything dies, that is not a distinction between good and bad. It is a constant condition. Without the contrast between life and death, the contrast between good and bad also disappears.
Predicting and chasing a good ending is often just an excuse for not taking the first step. Of course, free will enters here. Faced with the problem Arrival poses, some people would reject that kind of ending and avoid the tragedy altogether. There is no right or wrong in that either. It comes back to a formula: choice plus cost is the underlying logic of the adult world.
What is coming will come, and Novikov’s self-consistency principle still holds
Novikov’s self-consistency principle says that a person can travel back in time but cannot change the course of history. Our world is already the final outcome of changes that have been made.
The interesting part is that people chase good or bad results while throwing themselves into relationships they know are pits, imagining that they will be the last person who can make someone reform. This contradiction is not necessarily a failure of judgment. Perhaps a person has to fall into that fixed pit before they can later have a chance at true love.
Such a journey may be dramatic, but it is precisely these experiences that create the self who eventually has happiness. People only feel regret or resolve to keep walking when they see the doors of “if only.” Yet none of those actions can change history, and none of them affect the future. That is the Novikov self-consistency principle in ordinary life.
Before we got a dog, we already knew that a small dog lives only eight to ten years. That meant we would inevitably experience the animal’s death. The process is painful and cruel. It may look like a bad ending. But we did not ignore that ending; because of it, we treasured the time with the dog even more. We accompanied him through childhood, sent him to school, took him traveling—all to leave behind effort and experience we would not regret in his lifetime.
So when being-toward-death dismantles the supposed good or bad of an ending, what remains is the fact that the dog will die. The remaining question is whether we choose to go through the experience. If we feared the ending too much, we might never have met the two obedient, lovely Shiba Inus we have now.
The same is true in Arrival. The protagonist’s interactions with her daughter in childhood are beautiful experiences. They are not entirely negated because the ending is sad. This is not ignoring the ending. It is precisely because the ending serves as a reference point that the present moment becomes so precious.
The moment that lasts
Fatalism is cruel. Whether a person will be rich, whether the person they meet now is a destined partner, when they will face a life-and-death test—these things now appear fixed by fate. If someone actually handed you a file recording everything you would experience from this moment until death, most people would not want to read it. Such a fixed life is full of cruelty and helplessness.
But that file does exist. We simply do not have permission to read it. That is what we call fatalism. So what does free will decide? In the film, the protagonist learns that her daughter will become ill and leave her. She could choose not to go through that grief, not to have the child. Yet she still chooses to embrace the physicist and says the strange line that crosses time: “We haven’t held each other like this in a long time.” It is their first embrace, but she has already seen the ending—the daughter is born, the husband leaves after learning that his wife has the language ability, she raises the daughter alone, and then faces the daughter’s death in solitude.
A person who knows the ending chooses to want it and to bear the corresponding cost, gaining an experience on the timeline that cannot be erased. This is the eternal moment when that one percent of free will shines most brightly. It is not that there is no choice. It is that the person is prepared to meet the ending.
The underlying logic of so-called “no choice” belongs to people who find an external attribution for every choice in order to escape the cost. They use family of origin, illness, the self, or self-consistency as the final explanation and treat choice as escape.
Of course, someone will object: what about people born with disabilities? Do they have a choice? That question is swallowed by another closed loop—did they choose to be born? What they can choose is how to live with that disabled body. That is their choice. It is not the choice of a crowd to surround them with poems of praise, to tell them the world is beautiful, to brainwash them about social fairness, or even to make able-bodied people shed self-moving tears over their pain. Living is their business, not charity handed down from a moral high ground.
Another example: someone says they work day and night in Shanghai, and after rent and living expenses they have only 3,000 yuan left each month. They complain that they might as well go back to their rural home. Is that “no choice”? Is it not simply the cost they must pay because they chose to survive in Shanghai?
What outlasts the timeline
Fatalism fixes the ending. Free will chooses to go through the experience and leave an existence on the timeline. Within this system there is one presence we cannot ignore. It can cross timelines, dimensions, even species. Its eternity is made of countless moments.
This is the ultimate answer to being-toward-death. The only thing that does not perish, the thing that can continue after death, is love. It is not only romantic love. It can also be the bond between people, between people and animals, between people and things.
But for love to exist, free will must take a step toward the fixed ending at the moment of decision. It cannot wait forever for the ending to become good before walking forward.