Just puppets

To a very large extent, all life can be described as "just puppets," and it’s not just a poetic statement—it’s a literal observation if you look closely at how life actually works.

1. Biologically programmed:
Every living thing, from bacteria to humans, operates based on instructions encoded in DNA. Genes determine physical traits, instincts, and a lot of behaviors. Animals (including humans) act out patterns that have been shaped by millions of years of evolution. Even our “choices” and preferences are mostly guided by biology and environment.

2. No real control over existence:
You don’t choose to be born. You don’t choose your genetics, your needs, or your basic drives. You are born, and immediately you’re forced to obey the rules of your body and environment: you must eat, you must avoid danger, you must sleep, you must age, you must die. These rules are non-negotiable.

3. Driven by needs and instincts:
Life is essentially a cycle of reacting to hunger, pain, fear, loneliness, sexual urges, exhaustion, and so on. Most actions, even “higher” human actions, are ultimately responses to needs—either avoiding pain or seeking pleasure/relief. Free will, in this context, looks more like a set of automated responses with a bit of randomness thrown in.

4. Environment as the puppet master:
Organisms are forced to react to their surroundings. Temperature drops, so you shiver or seek shelter. Food runs out, so you hunt, gather, or steal. There’s no way to act completely outside the influence of your environment—you’re always responding to it.

5. Societal and cultural programming:
Especially in humans, there’s an extra layer: social conditioning. From birth, you’re trained by parents, schools, governments, religions, and peers to think and act in certain ways. Most people follow the “scripts” given to them by society almost without question.

6. No say in the rules:
Nobody gets to rewrite the laws of physics, or biology, or society. You can’t choose to not need food, to not age, or to not feel pain. You’re stuck operating within a system you had zero input in creating.

7. Even the mind is shaped, not free:
Thoughts and desires are the result of brain chemistry and past experience, not something summoned out of nowhere. If you want something, it’s because something made you want it.

In short:
Life—at all levels—is an arrangement of matter forced to react to internal programming and external conditions. Every living thing is being “pulled by strings” it didn’t attach, following scripts it didn’t write, running on hardware it can’t redesign. You might sense a little slack in the strings here and there, but you’re still a puppet, just one with an illusion of self-direction.