i answer yes to the latter 3. and while i believe i dont have free will, if you stop intellectualising and meditating all the time you can sometimes get immersed back into normal life and it will only be in the back of your mind and come up when you get hungover and physiologically depressed. unfortunately for me, when i get too happy and start rolling with life, i reach this peak, get attached to it, realise it's impermanent, see my impending fall, and try to fight it for a while before being consumed by depression again and then slowly coming out of it again with a bit more new wisdom, at the expense of my old wisdom. i have definitely had some very important lessons lost because of these distractions. they come back, sometimes weaker, sometimes stronger, but i fear i need to make a complete break one of these days and stop this bullshit bipolar manic/depressive cycle (i dont think its clinical, just merely a common pattern i find myself in... i dont know how to explain it, it would take a little while i think). I can't commit either. i think its fear, and i think i will beat it one day. it will just take a while before i am confident enough. i need to take it day by day, disciplining myself on accepting the fear. i once pulled back from a dmt breakthrough or bad trip because i thought i would go insane and come back with a broken brain. i was so afraid of that, and i stopped all drugs for a while after it, and came back from the meditation side and still lost it eventually doing that. i went on a retreat and i was the happiest id been in ages, then the free will, nihilism downward spiral got me, and i relapsed to smoking weed to get me through it. that was over a year ago, and i've learnt a lot since, but i think i built a lot of walls that i know need to be overcome one of these days, and the sooner the better, lest the lessons i've neglected become hazy

I completely get this. I'm stuck in a similar cycle. For me it always comes to a point where I have to justify to myself why I'm doing the 'constructive' thing I'm doing, but I can't. It's like there's a perpetual argument in the back of my mind waiting to strike when I start getting close to breaking out. The problem is the argument is right: it's all determined, there is no meaning, so why bother putting myself through pain just to accomplish things I don't really care about? Especially when whatever I end up doing, it's not my choice anyway - whatever I'm going to do is whatever I'm going to do; it can't possibly be any different. So why not just go back to the nihilistic way of maximising pleasure and comfort now?

It seems like the only answer for me relies on a kind of faith - the only way of circumnavigating a rational argument. It's like being faced with an unknown road which for some reason you think you might have to go down. I can choose to stay home, using up the energy that could be used to go down the road on things that I know will give me a certain result; each day taking from the energy that might help me get further down that road. Or, I can start driving down the road in the hopes that what I find might be significantly better than what I know. Which it could be, or, it could be a desolate wasteland which sees me waste the time and energy I could've enjoyed staying at home. To me, that's the gamble you have to find a way to take. At some point you have to essentially decide to do something for the sole reason that you decided to do it.