u/Andrewz_z

In India your religion is usually determined by which family you were born into. Your caste in many cases still shapes your opportunities before you make a single decision. Your gender determines which rules apply to you before you can speak.

None of this is unique to India. Every country does some version of this. But India does it with exceptional thoroughness and calls the result destiny or karma or God's will rather than the far simpler explanation, which is that you were born somewhere specific and the consequences followed.

I am not saying Indian culture has nothing valuable. I am saying the valuable parts deserve to be chosen consciously rather than absorbed automatically and defended reflexively.

The difference between a belief you chose after examination and a belief you absorbed before you could examine is not the content. It might be the same belief. The difference is whether it is actually yours.

How many of the things you most strongly believe about religion family gender and success did you actually arrive at yourself versus absorb from the environment you had no say in being placed in.

I do not mean this as an insult. I mean it as something I noticed about myself first ~

Most of the major decisions that shape a life happen before the person has a fully developed prefrontal cortex. What to believe. What kind of person to be. What to value. What success looks like. Who deserves love and who does not.

By the time you are adult enough to actually evaluate these decisions they have already been made and acted on long enough to feel like identity rather than choices.

The job you took because it was stable rather than because you wanted it. The relationship that continued past its expiry because leaving felt like failure. The beliefs you hold because questioning them would cost you community. The version of yourself you perform because the real one was not accepted early enough.

I am not saying people are victims. I am saying that living deliberately is much rarer than it looks from the outside and much harder than anyone advertises.

The people who seem most certain about who they are and what they want often just stopped questioning early. Certainty and clarity are not the same thing. One is earned. The other is just the absence of doubt.

If you stripped away everything you were told to want, what would actually be left? I asked myself this, and I was surprised by how long it took to find an answer.