I’m yet to complete “Determined” and “Behave” by Robert Sapolsky, but based on what I’ve read and what I know at this point, I hypothesize that a good framework for living life is the following:

  1. What you do is consider everyone else in the world an NPC. You consider that none of them have free will; that they are acting on pre-programmed coding that has been written by their genetics, their parenting, the experiences they have had in their lives, and so on. You consider each person a non-playable character, and what it does is that it increases empathy towards them. Whenever someone is rude to you or whenever someone is having a bad time, you actually understand that there is something in their programming that is making them do their stuff or go through that stuff. It makes you more empathetic, this model.
  2. What you do is consider that only you in the world have free will and agency. I think why that is important is because it makes the prefrontal cortex or the neocortex in general more aware and therefore better at making the correct choices. In fact, if you thought that you had no free will, if you considered that, then your brain would rationalize doing bad stuff. How do you counteract that? You assume that you do have free will and agency.

This is the model I propose: everyone else other than you is a non-playable character, pre-programmed and behaving on the basis of their programming, and only you have agency. You have to live that way.