A metaphysical thought experiment saluting Ozzy Osbourne
The news came to me on a grey Tuesday afternoon, scrolling through my phone with the bottom-third of my coffee going cold in my hand. “Ozzy Osbourne dead at 76.”
My chest tightened. I set down the mug and walked to the window, watching the world continue its ordinary rotations while feeling that something fundamental had shifted. It was only two weeks earlier that my social media feed was rife with clips from his final show.
There began a social media stream of tributes, anecdotes and, most of all, unity. In those first few days, it seemed we had let go of the divisive politics and the rage-farming online to mourn separately, but together.
A few days ago was the funeral procession—thousands lining Birmingham streets, a sea of black t-shirts—I wept. Not just for the Prince of Darkness, but for what his journey from those same working-class streets to this near-state funeral represented: the cosmic dance between what we’re given and what we choose.
I’ve carried this question with me since my twenties, when I followed a girlfriend to South Korea on what I thought was merely romantic whim. That year abroad, meant to be a brief adventure, became the fulcrum on which my life pivoted. Watching families torn apart by the Korean War reunite in front of me—elderly siblings embracing after decades of political division, I understood something profound about the weight of circumstance and the grace of choice. Before Korea, I might have stayed on the expected path—steady job, predictable trajectory, the slow suffocation of playing it safe. But witnessing how arbitrarily borders and ideologies could sever human connection made me realize how precious and precarious our agency truly is.
Ozzy’s life embodies this tension magnificently. Born in post-war Aston, he faced constraints that determinists cite as evidence of fate’s heavy hand. Dyslexia made school torturous. His family crammed into a two-bedroom house with no indoor plumbing. By seventeen, he’d been arrested for burglary, seemingly destined for the grinding poverty that claimed so many neighbours. The statistics were clear: young people from Birmingham’s working class were employed in factories when fortunate, or faced worse prospects when they weren’t. They never became global icons.
Was it written in the stars that one day, hearing The Beatles on his transistor radio, that young John Osbourne would experience epiphany? That precise moment when possibility cracked open the shell of circumstance? Consider how he described this turning point—not just listening to music but feeling his entire world transform in an instant. Was that transformation purely the product of individual will meeting random opportunity?
I believe it’s both—and neither. My years in South Korea taught me to see destiny not as a fixed point but as a range of possibilities, like notes on a scale. We’re given the instrument and perhaps even the key signature, but how we play those notes, which ones we emphasize, whether we dare to improvise—that’s where agency lives. Ozzy could have heard The Beatles and returned to his construction job the next day. Millions did. Instead, he chose to answer the transformative tension between fate and freedom.
This isn’t the prosperity gospel dressed in philosophical clothes. Ozzy’s path was brutal. Addiction nearly killed him multiple times. Critics dismissed Black Sabbath as noise. Parents warned their children against his supposed satanic influence. But watching that funeral procession, seeing the seeing and feeling the grief, I was struck by how profoundly he had rewritten his cosmic contract. As one fellow musician noted on stage the night of Ozzy’s death, “for being the Prince of Darkness he sure brought a lot of light.”
I’ve tried to apply mainstream philosophy to this idea of free-will within the confines of a pre-determined existence. I found great difficulty in the “one-or-the-other” approach. Though perhaps philosophically crude, I only arrive to a point-of-view in reflecting about what I know of how Ozzy Osbourne lived his life—complicated, nuanced, a little from both sides of the same coin.
Eastern philosophies see karma as cumulative action shaping destiny, while Western thought valorizes individual agency. But these frameworks feel too neat for the messy magnificence of a life like Ozzy’s—or any life lived authentically. His authenticity wasn’t just personal style; it was cosmic defiance. In an era that demanded conformity, that told working-class kids to know their place, he became unapologetically himself.
Sharon Osbourne has suggested repeatedly in media engagements that what drew her to Ozzy was his inability to be anything but genuine. Their partnership—both romantic and professional—illustrates another dimension of this dance with destiny.
Was their meeting predetermined? Perhaps. But the daily choice to see each other clearly, to build something together despite addiction, mental illness, and the corrosive effects of fame—that required constant acts of will. Love might be written in the stars, but staying in love means showing up every day to rewrite the story.
I think about this when people tell me they feel trapped by circumstance. A quote I saw recently resonated:
“Do not fret over the passing storms in your life. They remove the things that are not solid, and they reveal the things that are.”
Yes, economic realities constrain us. Yes, following your passion is a privilege not everyone can afford. But within whatever range of notes we’re given, we can still choose our melody.
My time in Korea revealed this truth viscerally. Nothing in my Canadian middle-class upbringing pointed toward Seoul. No cosmic sign suggested I’d find profound self-discovery in a country whose language I didn’t speak. But that choice—risky, impractical, following love rather than logic—opened possibilities I couldn’t have imagined. It taught me that destiny isn’t a destination but a direction, one we adjust with every choice we make.
Ozzy’s funeral wasn’t attended by heads of state discussing his legacy. The thousands who gathered weren’t there because he’d been a traditional success story. They came because, as his life testified, we don’t have to accept the scripts we’re handed. When he sang about not wanting to change the world or be changed by it, he articulated the paradox at the heart of human existence: we’re both subject to forces beyond our control and yet capable of profound transformation.
Recent data from positive psychology research suggests that people who view their lives as meaningful report feeling both constrained by circumstances and free to make choices—not despite the contradiction but because of it. The tension itself creates meaning. Ozzy’s journey from Birmingham’s slums to Birmingham’s streets lined with mourners illustrates this perfectly. He couldn’t change where he started, but he transformed what it meant.
As I write this, I’m conscious of my own ongoing negotiation with fate. The conventional wisdom says to network strategically, to craft a personal brand, to play the game. But Ozzy’s legacy whispers a different truth: that authenticity, however costly, creates its own gravity. That the universe responds to genuine commitment. That within our predetermined range, we can still play notes that shake the heavens.
This isn’t magical thinking. It’s the hardest kind of realism. It means accepting that yes, structures constrain us—class, geography, neurodiversity all matter profoundly. But it also means recognizing that within those constraints, our choices reverberate. Ozzy made music despite dyslexia making it hard to read. He found love despite addiction trying to destroy it. He gave away more money than he kept, remained accessible to fans when fame could have insulated him, stayed curious about the world when cynicism would have been easier.
Perhaps this is why his death hit so hard. In losing Ozzy, we lost a reminder that the improbable is possible. That a working-class kid with learning disabilities and a criminal record could help create an entire musical (and television) genre, inspire millions to embrace their authentic selves, and leave the world fundamentally changed.
Millions of people do not mourn Ozzy Osbourne because they knew him—they mourn him because he helped us know ourselves.
His life was both utterly unlikely and somehow inevitable—the perfect paradox of human existence.
Ozzy’s life reminds me that we each have our own music to make. The notes might be written in the stars, but we choose the rhythm, the volume, the heart with which we play them. And in that choosing, in that daily commitment to authenticity despite the cost, we write our names in the cosmic ledger.
So when you feel trapped by circumstance, remember the kid from Aston who heard The Beatles and decided to answer. When authenticity seems too expensive, remember that playing it safe costs more. When the weight of fate feels crushing, remember that even predetermined notes can be played with such passion, such commitment, such outrageous authenticity that they reshape the very stars that wrote them.
Ozzy is gone. But the music he made—not just with his voice but with the lives he’s touched—echoes still. In every authentic decision, every risky leap toward who we truly are, every refusal to accept that circumstances define us, we add our own notes to that cosmic composition. The scale might be set, but the song?
The song is ours to play.
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