“Fate” is a fancy way of saying “hindsight is 20/20”. What happened was the only thing that could ever happen.

Destiny is the same thing as physics. There’s some equations that can help you describe what you’re seeing effectively but don’t confuse the equation for the thing itself

Can be a fun trope in fiction. Doesn’t exist IRL, which is a good thing.

I don’t quite believe in that stuff, but it’s a fun way to think about all the positive coincidences in your life and maybe let go of anger about negative situations you can’t change.

It is a heap of horseshit that people make up to comfort themselves.

Like potential it doesn’t mean a damn thing.

It’s a fun series, but is really allergic to consistency in things like history and rules. They need to abandon all these alternative timelines and give me MORE SHIROU

It’s a scapegoat used by scoundrels to assuage their guilt and escape accountability for their behavior. “It was fate, it was destiny, it was going to happen anyway, nothing can be done about it, so no reason to feel bad.”

I think it’s appropriate that the anglo-saxon word for fate, wyrd, is retained in English as the word “weird,” because it seems folks only really turn to destiny as an explanation when something seems kinda strange and they don’t have another explanation.

don’t believe in it any more than ghosts, god, or goblins.

The past and the future are both malleable, and the present impossible to accurately perceive.

Things in the past are destined to be. Funny how that doesn’t work with the present.

The universe is probably deterministic somehow, but seeing it that way is bad for my mental health, and there’s no functional difference between true random and pseudo-random you can’t crack, so I kinda don’t care.

A future leader of humanity will have said once:

No fate but what we make for ourselves.

Fate is an anthropomorphization of the sum of things that happen in the universe. Does it exist? It exists the same way the universe exists. Can it be known or understood? Partially, maybe more completely if we discover a coherent Theory of Everything. Does it have a will? Not in the way that we generally think of will, but it contains the sum of all wills in the universe, and there are sometimes local convergences of minds that produce emergent effects that feel like more than random noise, because they are.

Is it a useful concept? I think it’s a prototype tool our ancestors came up with for framing cosmic cause and effect, which is useful in some circumstances. I think it’s too crude a tool, and it’s more useful to think about cause and effect more locally because most of the time, local effects dominate outcomes and when they don’t, it’s extremely difficult to make useful inferences about outcomes because we can’t really think about the whole universe all at once. That’s why invocations of fate are usually associated with throwing up one’s hands in despair and/or accepting whatever Fate has thrown at you.

Fate is a (non-comprehensive) model of the entire universe. The universe is chaotic and complicated, full of exceptions and apparent contradictions. It is, as far as I know, impossible to predict. That’s why simpler models are helpful, even if they are incomplete representations of the universe, because they allow us to select the most influential factors of the universe and study them in isolation. Fate is overwhelming in scope, and we usually feel helpless in the face of such cosmic forces. It deters us from action.

I could go on, I think Fate as a concept, how we use it to influence ourselves and each other, is enormously fascinating and important to how humans make decisions in their lives. But I think I’ve hit a natural stopping point and to go on would grow too repetitive without more careful editing.

No such thing, beyond what we ourselves choose to do and what others do to/for us. Chaos rules the day, I’m afraid.