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The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.

Carl Jung

Where I Came From

I spent much of my childhood in a residential public school in Shillong, though my roots are in Jorhat, Assam, where I come from a traditional family with generations of history behind it. Like a lot of Indian families, ours believed in the usual things passed down over time: respect your elders, study hard, follow the rules, honour your family’s name, do what’s expected of you.

Living away from home so young only reinforced all of that. School had its own structure, its own discipline, its own unwritten rules. There was a timetable for everything, a right way to behave, an expectation that you’d fit into the system. At home there was the comfort of tradition. At school there was the expectation of conformity. Neither felt oppressive at the time. Both were, in their own way, trying to prepare me for life.

I got discipline out of it. Resilience too. A real respect for responsibility that’s stayed with me. I don’t regret any of it.

But somewhere in my twenties, a different question started nagging at me, quietly, in the background, the way questions do when you’re too busy to sit with them properly.

How much of the person I’d become was actually me?

How Much of Me Is Actually Me?

None of us starts with a blank slate. We don’t choose our parents, our language, our religion, our caste, our culture, or the country we’re born into. Long before we’re old enough to ask a single question about the world, the world has already gone to work on us. Family shapes us. School shapes us. The society around us shapes us, mostly without asking permission.

Belonging matters, to be clear. No civilisation survives without shared values, trust, some baseline of cooperation. I’m not arguing against any of that.

But somewhere in the process of belonging, a smaller, quieter question tends to get buried.

Who am I underneath all of this?

For years, without really noticing I was doing it, I confused approval with doing the right thing. If people liked a decision I’d made, I felt sure of myself. If they questioned it, I started questioning myself, sometimes more than the decision actually deserved. Looking back, I’d basically handed over my sense of right and wrong to whoever happened to be in the room.

Two Books That Pulled Me in Different Directions

One of the books that really rattled something loose in me was The Courage to Be Disliked, which is where I first properly encountered Alfred Adler’s ideas. Adler’s argument, roughly, is that a lot of our unhappiness comes from living for other people’s approval. The moment your sense of worth depends on being liked, you’ve quietly stopped living your own life and started performing for whoever’s watching.

Around the same period, I got into some of Sam Harris’s writing on free will, and it unsettled me for an entirely different reason. His point, put simply, is that we don’t choose our genes, our childhood, our family, the culture we’re dropped into. Even our thoughts, he argues, arise out of causes we never consciously authored. If that’s even half true, how much of what we call a “choice” is actually ours?

For a while I genuinely thought Adler and Harris were contradicting each other. One is telling you to take responsibility for your life. The other is quietly asking whether free will exists in the way we like to imagine it does.

It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realise they weren’t really arguing about the same thing at all.

Freedom probably isn’t the absence of influence. I don’t think that’s ever fully possible, for anyone.

It might just start with noticing the influence in the first place.

The moment you recognise how thoroughly you’ve been shaped, by family, school, religion, work, the culture around you, you gain something worth having. Not escape from those forces. Just the ability to actually look at them, instead of running on them without ever checking.

Everyday Inheritance, Indian Style

India makes this particular question more layered than most places, I think. We’re shaped not just by family, but by language, religion, caste, region, festivals, community, all pulling in their own directions at once. Ideas about purity and pollution, local custom, the small superstitions nobody bothers to explain, all of it quietly seeps into how we think and live. It shows up in what we eat, what we wear, who we marry, the careers we’re nudged toward, the relationships we’re allowed to have without a fuss.

These influences give us identity. They give us a place to belong. They also quietly hand us assumptions about success, respect, happiness, that we rarely examine because nobody taught us to.

Some of those inherited values are worth keeping exactly as they are. Some genuinely deserve to be questioned. Most of the difficulty is just telling the two apart.

To me, individuality was never about rebellion. It was never about walking away from family, faith or culture. It’s closer to ownership, actually holding a belief because you examined it, rather than simply having grown up inside it. The question worth asking isn’t whether a value came from somewhere. It’s whether you’d still choose it if it hadn’t.

Holding On, Differently

Getting older hasn’t made me reject the things I learned as a child. If anything, I’ve come to appreciate a lot of them more than I did at twenty. Discipline. Respect. Responsibility. Kindness. A sense of community.

What’s changed is how I hold them. These days I try to keep those values because I’ve chosen them consciously, not simply because they were handed to me before I was old enough to have an opinion.

There’s a real difference between inheriting a value and earning it. One arrives without your involvement. The other you have to sit with, argue with, sometimes discard and pick back up before it becomes properly yours.

The Cost of Being Yourself

Authenticity isn’t free, and I’ve paid enough of that bill to know it. The moment you stop shaping every decision around pleasing people, someone, somewhere, ends up disappointed. Pick a career people don’t quite understand, set a boundary, change your mind publicly, refuse to go along with an expectation, and criticism follows fairly reliably. There’s no honest way to live that skips being misunderstood occasionally.

Maybe that’s the real reason so many of us spend our lives chasing approval instead. It just feels safer.

Safety and freedom don’t usually book the same ticket, though.

What I’ve Landed On, For Now

The older I get, the less I care about being universally liked. I’d rather be respected than approved of. I’d rather someone question a life I chose deliberately than praise one I never really examined.

That might be what freedom actually is. Not freedom from family. Not freedom from society. Not even freedom from influence, since that one probably isn’t on offer.

Just the freedom to look closely at your own life, choose your values on purpose, and accept that not everyone is going to agree with what you land on.

The goal was never to be disliked, for what it’s worth. The goal is closer to being someone whose choices are driven by conviction rather than a need for validation.

And if that costs a little approval along the way, it’s turned out to be a price I don’t mind paying.

Related reading: If this resonated, you might also like The Observer is the Observed: Life Lessons from J. Krishnamurti.