I’ve had my personal torments dealing with the conclusions and implications of science and philosophy, and i ended up adopting a stance that’s both very similar and very different to yours. I simply cannot believe in free-will but in the same time i see its immense value. Struggling with the aspects surrounding free-will and personal identity, i slowly developed an intuition that symbolic models (even though coherent with the reality they describe) can constrain us as much as they free us from our small-mindedness.
Here’s a paragraph from an essay i wrote on this:

“A second insight came to me while listening to a senior British lady philosopher as she tried to save the “soul” from her ghostbusting physicalist interlocutors (off course i didn’t liked her speech very much but i was lucky i listened). I don’t remember exactly what she said but my realisation was that in the past few years i’ve slowly transformed the “topology” of my phenomenal experience from being a full and vibrant self to one of being a zestless observer perceiving/appreciating symbolic models of itself. The lady philosopher must of said something about the fact that we’ve become bewitched by 3rd person symbolic constructs and ignoring the 1st person dimension that is the sacred heart of our phenomenal life. I was a prime example, displaying all the symptoms of someone who internalised this greater cultural mindset. For me the weight of reality was shifted towards the 3rd person/symbolic pole of experience, making for a very dull conscious life. Listening to that debate was itself precisely to the scope of enriching my schematic panorama!

Human selves may be illusions but they’re nevertheless extraordinary natural manifestations that allow for a great variety of particulars, each having their own immense subtleties — as far as we know they are the jewels of natural creativity. Just by believing in her soul, that lady philosopher has/is one.. At least for as long as she’s alive. My instinct to criticise her was similar with shouting at a wine aficionado that taste-and-smell appreciation are highly influenceable hallucinations of the nervous system and not qualities inherent in the wine. I’d be right in some way but certainly irrational in my attempt to tell somebody that she cannot enjoy her-self or her wine. One thing would be clear though: I… certainly wouldn’t be enjoying the wine!”

So, i haven’t ended up believing in my free-will but i’m nonetheless starting to believe that considering my lack of freedom (grasping too tightly to my symbolic models of reality) does constrain my phenomenal experience. And i also got a whiff of what mysticism means: if you trully believe in something you can eventually bring some of its phenomenal consequences into your experience in some manner (illusory or not — whatever that means, because within some forms of idealism the concept of illusion should mean a different thing than in material epiphenomenalism) and off course within certain limits allowed by the laws of nature. I think that there is a tremendous space of possibility to explore, and even though there’s no real “free-will” in our movements through this space, we can nonetheless take comfort in the fact that we have the ability to accumulate knowledge, rationality and wisdom on our side to steer us.

If personal and professional activity allows you any time to read such ideas coming from naive philosophers and respond on them then i’d be very curious on what you’d have to say about it: https://medium.com/@rares_mircea_82/our-symbolic-life-appears-to-be-closing-itself-into-a-trap-of-its-own-making-19638abfe77c