I get to choose my present and future.

Not every position offers the same number of moves.

A chess player in a bad position still has legal ones, and some are much better than others. That is the honest version of choice: real, constrained, and worth taking seriously precisely because the constraints are real too.

The trap is treating it as all or nothing — either you control your life or you don't, and since you obviously don't, why bother with the small ones.

Small ones compound. What time you get up. Which of two people you call back. Whether the thing you keep flinching from gets started this month or next year. Nobody picks the board. Everybody picks the move.