When you’re born into the world, you’re only the latest in the long line of people to have ever lived. Millenniums of history stretch out behind you, and the present is so full of people currently living that you, despite how wonderful and full of potential you are, currently only stand out as the tiniest blip on the seven-billion large scale of humans.
You don’t stand a chance. From the second you start learning the world is shaped by events that are happening around you. If people around you are noisy and have frowny faces, then, well, the world is just going to be choc-full of noisy-frowny-people. You’ve already been shaped.
When you go to school, you meet all sorts of different people. Depending on what kind of a shaping you’ve had in infant-hood, you’ll be inspired to act in a way which will determine your placement in the hierarchy of the playground. And everyone on the playground has had a different experience growing up, and is going to treat each other differently. Yes, I’ll share my crisps with you, or perhaps, no, they’re mine, leave me alone. Teachers, who are quite a ways further along the line of life than you are and have had their own lives shaped, have now also fallen into the default authority-figure status. Perhaps, in classes, they’ll impart their wisdom onto you between educational routines. And that, in turn, will shape you.
You’re continuing to grow, holy moly you’re a teenager already, did somebody speed up the process or do you only exist as a fictive example? The latter, I’m afraid. But that’s besides the point; at this point in your life I like to think you learn individualism. You start to think more for yourself, to question some things, for instance, why do we have to go to school all the time? When the heck am I going to use algebra in real life? Why shouldn’t I accept the cigarette one of the higher years offered me? And so on. But even then, you’re looking to examples of pre-existing ways of thinking and living to guide you on your course to your own uniqueness. Your own you.
And so on. What I’m getting at here is that people live their lives in the same way that everyone around them lives theirs. People live in houses, so I suppose I should do. People have jobs, so I suppose I should get one too. Everyone has to have a car; why don’t I, too? If you decided to live by yourself in the countryside and built your own house, hunted / grew your own food, you’d be mad. It’s outside the social construct, so it’s not an option.
We live our lives within the social guidelines every day of our lives, copying others not for the sake of trying to be them but because it’s what everyone else does. So really, the chances of you coming up with a unique idea or personality isn’t looking wholly probable. Not only do you live in a world that’s been established by countless predecessors for many hundreds of years, but you live in a constantly evolving present tense in which people are gathering together, discussing the way the world works, and moving it on, without stopping to consult you in the slightest. You’re just one of the most recent human beings; we’ve been here since the dawn of time. Who are you to be different?
Just remember that not everything is set in stone, not even civilisation. Think about why we do what we do, and what it means in the grand scheme of things as a sentient animal. Or, hell, just an animal; we invented the concept of sentience.
Perpetually Perturbed 