If you had to boil down why you are where you are in life, how would you characterize that? Would you reverse engineer the circumstances of your life? Would you ascribe it to external forces? Would you liken it to fate, nature, or nurture? Perhaps a nice cocktail, a compatibilist concoction of all of the above? I pose this question to because we're at a checkpoint (at least for me) -- It has been over a year since I made one of the most consequential decisions of my life, to quit my day job.  I've been thinking a lot about the forces that led me to make that decision and I think I've had something of a revelation. In this transmission, we'll explore said realization and more.