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Notes -
I think that's perfectly reasonable, but as I said that isn't how I understand the idea of determinism. I don't think anyone, even the staunchest of free will advocates, believes that outside influences don't have a significant weight in the choices you make. But again, as I understand it determinism is saying that those are the only thing that matter, and that one's course is set in stone from the moment their life begins (with no actual choice to be made). And indeed that makes sense with respect to the name, because if the individual has any agency at all then the outcome is not deterministic.
I believe that one's choices are heavily influenced by the state one is in, but at the end of the day we still have free choice. So for example, I struggle to not be lazy. This is no doubt the result of many factors (my genes, perhaps something my parents did, years of ingrained habits). It's very likely that I'll make the lazy choice in any given situation. But in the end, I do have a choice, and ultimately bear the responsibility no matter what is tipping my mental scales.
Again, I'll affirm that we choose stuff, though I'm sure we disagree on what exactly "choose" means—to me deliberation between choices and, based upon that deliberation, coming to have in your will definitive intent would certainly suffice for choice, but you don't think it so, evidently. I'd accordingly affirm that we have plenty of agency, we choose to do stuff all the time, and our actions obviously bear the imprint of our own character and agency—it's not like they're happening apart from and abstracted away from us.
But I fundamentally don't see things like "I'm habitually lazy" as some outside factor in my decision-making. It's something inside, a part of you, and your doing things accordingly is a natural outflow of you.
So, perhaps another question: can choices be accurately be described, in your view, as the product of a mixture of a determined part, including all the reasons motivating, your character, the circumstances, etc, combined with an indeterminate, arbitrary part? Perhaps, could we express it as a random number generator, with the choose/choose otherwise set at some threshold, not necessarily 50% depending on the other factors?
Because that seems to me something like what you're describing, and that isn't at all like what I'd want choices to be like. I want to be the doer, and I'm a thing, with real states and properties, not something arbitrary. Causelessness seems to subtract agency, to me.
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