I think even if we accept free-will exists, that we tend to over-estimate how much our free-will we actually have and how much they actually affect our lives. Every decision we are face with is a result of not only the chance that has brought us to that decision, but of all of the previous decisions and, thus, the probabilities involved with all of the decisions before that. A lot of things FEEL like choices, but when actually evaluating them, a lot of the time that choice is illusory or so mundane as to be pointless.
That is, so many of our choices aren’t so much a matter of really making a choice, but simply determining what our preferences are and acting on making those happen. A lot of times, we artificially limit our options based on expectations. For example, “What college do you want to go to?” asked to a high school student. At least in my case, there wasn’t really any decision to it, it was obvious what colleges to apply to, based on what I wanted to study, and I went to the best one that accepted me. So that was dependent upon my choice in field of study, but looking back at what got me interested in that was, part that I just ended up in a class on it and was good on it, and that it was similar to the field my parents worked in, which is also how they met and I was born to begin with. So, how much of my choice of college was REALLY a personal decision and how much was just a natural consequence of the events preceding and how they played out probabilistically?
In my mind, what would have REALLY been exercising a decision would have been to apply to other colleges, to study something else, or to not go to college at all. Or, in fact, to REALLY choose to do that, rather than just naturally follow through.
I think we spend a lot of our lives just making the default decisions. There’s not really anything wrong with that. I think the default decisions are often the best ones, especially with how society has developed to help guide and protect us. But how often do we really CHOOSE the default rather than simply ACCEPT the default? Consider, for a moment, that for most of us, life is the accepted default choice that we simply accept. We were born without a choice in it, our instincts, our biology, society, drives us to live and make decisions that help us live, but short of those who have seriously contemplated suicide, nearly died, or philosophically contemplated their own mortality, we just continually accept that default choice, and even for those who have, they only really think about that aspect sometimes.
So, ultimately, my point is, the overwhelming majority of our decisions aren’t really actively choosing something other than what would naturally happen, or even actively choosing the default action, but simply accepting things as they come. Thus, in a strange way, even if we accept free-will, we’re still pretty much stuck in a self-imposed determinism for all the a handful of choices, as even the big ones are overwhelmingly influenced by countless other non-choices.