There was a movie I watched a year ago or so It proved that free will does not exist. At least as what we think of as free will. If anything at all we just have control of 1% of the stuff we do. We are observers to what our brain does. If we think about something we just get what our brain thought just a nano second ago. We are on on auto pilot 99% of the time thats why you can think about stuff and at the same time cross the street without getting killed. Etc. Its trained behavior.
I once dropped a knife and even tho I know that knifes are sharp I tried to catch it and cut my hand because my brain is used to catching stuff I drop.
Its very ressource intense for our lets call it ME/ICH/The thing we actually are to be activated or to control and see everything thats going on so to save ressources we are on auto pilot. If you go to a supermarket for the first time your brain calculates the least annyoing path because it automatically outweights positive and negative stuff. It guesses the best route to go to the supermarket based on areas you already visited before and other information saved in your memory. It can fail to do so but it still does it automatically. We then just believe we chose the path on our own.
So lets say you are on your way now then YOU (the consciousness) get activated to take notice of the obstacles and special stuff thats on the route. (thats why learning stuff/doing stuff fo the first time is so hard) But not YOU chose what you are looking at its still happening automatically based on prior experiences. We just think we are looking at stuff we want.
Lets say you go to the same super market again 1 day later then YOU will again be activated to check what your first visit recorded and correct it if needed.
If the route is saved in your brain you will now go the route on auto pilot. You can think of it as a holodeck your brain creates . If you think about lets say your girlfriend breaking up and are totally occupied by this thoughts you will still be able to find the way unconscious because our brain feeds our senses with FAKE information coming from the brain instead of realtime info coming from ears, nose or eyes etc. You dont really see the street you are walking on its a recreation by your brain. YOU will only be activated when something happens that was not there before like a fast driving car etc.
Our "consciousness" was shaped by what our childhood etc was like and this will always be the case.
P.S. the "thinking about girlfriend breaking up" is also nothing you can choose to do. You either developed as an idividual that ignores unimportat stuff like people breaking up, as a person that is very emotional that really gets hit hard by stuff like this or as a person that has a 50/50% chance of being affected by this. You can not chose by free will if you will miss your girlfriend or not.
So i have to agree with OP.
