Most of us don’t construct our lives entirely by accident. We make choices, work towards things, develop relationships and gradually build an idea of who we are. But we don’t do any of that in isolation.
We learn remarkably early what gets rewarded. We notice what makes our families proud, what earns recognition at work, what makes us desirable to other people and what our particular corner of the world considers successful. None of that is necessarily sinister. Other people’s expectations can push us towards things we genuinely want and help us become people we are perfectly happy to be.
The difficulty comes when we can no longer tell where their expectations end and our own choices begin.
You can become very good at being someone you never consciously decided to be. In fact, the better you become at it, the harder that identity can be to question. There may be years of achievement behind it, people who know you because of it and a life built around continuing to be recognisably that person.
Questioning any of this does not mean the life you have built is false. I’m not convinced there is some hidden, more authentic version of ourselves waiting underneath everything other people have influenced. We are shaped by other people. The interesting question is whether we still want to keep choosing what those influences helped us create.
If nobody was going to be impressed, disappointed, surprised or even particularly interested in what you did next, what would you want?
And where in your life are you still trying to earn something you may already have?
Want to keep exploring this? I’ve picked something you might find useful.
Further Reading
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