Reflecting on free will

Heya! I have always wanted to come back and write and reflect here more. Rather than committing myself to lofty targets, I plan to be intentionally inconsistent here and writing here only when something strikes me so hard that I cannot stop writing about it. So what's something now that I cannot shut up about it?

I was watching my partner play 'Last of Us' video game where he was trying to shoot a deer. It made me wonder how the programmers and designers would have coded this game to make the deer escape everytime he shot an arrow. But it was so realistic to the extent that it gave me a sense of illusory control even to an observer like me. I genuinely believed that he just shot it incorrectly and he will get the deer in a few more tries. It is something I know for sure because well..without it whats the purpose of playing this.

Then my 'thoughts train' took me to how there are so many theories about how our lives on earth is a simulation (string theory, other holographic simulations etc). So many of us believe that we have free will in choosing our every action and make our lives more miserable. But what if its not? What if it is a simulation and there are only some pre-set and pre-defined outcomes depending on the logical flow.

I'm not a physicist or a deeply philosophical person to think more on all this. But it was just interesting for me to ponder. Maybe our lives would be significantly easier if we just sit and let it flow?