The whole question of fate vs. freedom is one that can only arise out of the human attempt to look back at life and extract some kind of meaning out of it.
The question of whether we are 'determined' has no bearing on the decisions that each of us make every day in real-time. We are free to make choices, yes. We are part of a physical world that behaves according to natural laws, also true. Those natural laws don't negate our ability to make choices that have meaning - they only describe how we do, in fact, behave.
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