The more we learn about the brain and behavior, the more we are forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: absolute free will may be an illusion. Much of what we think, choose, or do is influenced — or even determined — by unconscious processes, genetics, and environmental conditioning. These are factors we neither choose nor control, yet they shape the very core of our decision-making. This realization can feel like an existential blow. If so much is happening beneath awareness, then what part of our choices are truly ours?

This is where the fishbowl metaphor offers both clarity and comfort. Picture your free will not as an open ocean, but as a confined bowl. Within this bowl, you are free to swim, but your options are constrained by the shape and size of the space — your biology, your upbringing, your culture. You cannot swim outside the bowl, but you can still choose how you move within it.

More importantly, this fishbowl is not fixed. Each time you make the best choice available to you, each time you resist a bad habit or cultivate a better pattern, you don’t escape the bowl, but you earn a new one. Slowly, your environment of possibilities expands. The walls shift. Your options improve. This is how change happens — not all at once, but incrementally, over time.

Growth, then, is the process of upgrading your fishbowl. By making consistently better choices within the limits of the present, you increase the range of choices available in the future. Free will exists not as total freedom, but as a navigable path of progress. It’s not about being completely free. It’s about being free enough to become someone who is freer than before.

So while the bowl remains, so does your agency — humble, constrained, but profoundly powerful in its capacity to move you forward.