Free will does exist & doesn’t at the same time, everything is predetermined by your current ideologies & interpretations of past experiences. Think of it like this, there’s a path, this path is made up of two materials, your beliefs & your past experiences. It’s impossible to venture off of this path unless the world changes your fundamental beliefs, through hardships or inspiration. Your free will is determined by what you think you know currently, not what you know as true. It doesn’t matter what your path is made of it’s all just different frameworks to interpret the world better. Some frameworks make the world easier to live in, some make the world harder to live in. Everyone has a different framework of how they perceive the world. You could make the argument that I can choose to do x at anytime I want to, isn’t that free will? Well no, because if you wanted to do x you’d simply do x. You haven’t done x because it’s not in you to do x, your beliefs or whatever values you hold, currently prevent you from being that person that would choose x in the first place. Any hypothetical situations create a different person entirely, it would only be possible to do x if your framework changed and your framework could only change if it was meant to change. The what ifs are irrelevant, the what ifs never happened, the what ifs aren’t your current reality. The ego will do anything to protect itself from being vulnerable. You often find people talking about what could have been instead of what is, it’s the ego way of trying to create who we want to be instead of who we actually are, it’s a also a coping mechanism for regretting ones decisions that we perceive as bad. Giving them this idea that they could have been someone entirely different, only if this had went “right.”

Possibly, our current selves staring at our past selves are the reason we think free will exist in the first place