✦ Prefer to listen?
Let Human Glimmer read this one to you.
We all believe things.
Some of our beliefs are easier to recognize than others. We have ideas about what makes a good life, what happens when we die, or what kind of person we want to be. And we know someone else could look at those same questions and come to completely different conclusions.
But we also believe things we probably don’t realize. We have ideas about what success looks like and how relationships are supposed to work. We believe certain things about the kind of person we are. Some of those ideas are so familiar that calling them beliefs almost feels strange because, from our perspective, they’re simply true.
Every once in a while, though, you find out that something you’ve known for years isn’t true at all. Maybe it’s some random fact you learned as a kid and never had a reason to question. Then one day something makes you look it up, and you discover you’ve spent half your life confidently believing something that isn’t true.
And then comes the really annoying part. You can’t even remember where the hell you learned it.
Maybe a parent told you or you heard it at school. You might not be able to remember at all. At some point the information made its way into your head, stayed there long enough to become familiar, and eventually stopped feeling like something you had learned. It just became something you knew.
I wonder how much of what we believe happens that way.
We start learning about the world long before we’re capable of seriously questioning what we’re being taught. The people who raise us show us what normal looks like. The communities around us introduce us to particular ways of living and thinking. Our own experiences start filling in the rest.
Now don’t get me wrong. Some of who we are has been there from the beginning. People don’t arrive in the world with identical personalities. One child might naturally be more cautious while another wants to climb everything they can reach. People have been arguing about nature and nurture for a very long time, and we don’t need to solve that argument to recognize that both probably have something to do with the person who eventually starts deciding what they believe.
By the time we’re old enough to really do that, though, we already believe quite a bit.
Maybe your family rarely talked about money, so you learned that money was private. Maybe everyone around you treated one particular kind of lifestyle as the definition of success. You may have grown up around relationships that quietly taught you what love was supposed to look like. Nobody necessarily sat you down and announced that these were the things you should believe. Sometimes we learn what is normal simply because it is what we know, and what we know has a way of feeling right.
Nostalgia is a really interesting example of that. An old song can make you feel something before you’ve had time to think about why. A tradition can feel comforting because you’ve done it for as long as you can remember. Something your family always did can feel like the way something is supposed to be done simply because it’s the way you’ve always done it.
That doesn’t mean those things are bad or that we need to question every tradition we’ve ever loved. Plenty of what we inherit from other people is worth keeping. There are beliefs our families gave us that we might examine carefully and still decide that they’re something we would choose for ourselves. But something feeling familiar doesn’t mean we chose it.
We don’t reach adulthood and suddenly start forming our beliefs in isolation, either. We’re still taking things in from the people around us, the environments we spend time in, and the messages we’re exposed to over and over again. Some of that influence is obvious. A lot of it isn’t.
Advertising is an easy example because nobody is pretending an advertisement doesn’t want something from us. A company wants us to remember its name, associate its product with something desirable, and eventually choose it over something else. We know that’s happening, but knowing we’re being advertised to doesn’t mean none of it works.
You might see the same product over and over again alongside people who look happy, successful, attractive, or confident. Eventually, some of that association can stick, even if you’ve never consciously decided the product has anything to do with those things.
We’re still making a choice. Being influenced by something doesn’t mean we suddenly lose all ability to think for ourselves. But a choice can feel completely like our own without being completely untouched by outside influence.
And advertising is only one small part of everything we’re exposed to. Nowadays, we have an absolutely enormous amount of information coming at us every day.
If somebody tells us something, most of us have a device within reach that can help us figure out whether it’s actually true. You would think having that kind of access would make it incredibly difficult for bad information to spread.
You would think…but that’s not how things have played out.
Someone posts something online and it sounds believable. Maybe it’s about relationships, health, or some random thing happening in the world. We read it, accept it, and keep scrolling. Later we repeat it to somebody else, and if they trust us, there’s a pretty good chance they aren’t going to stop the conversation and start investigating our sources.
The person sharing it might genuinely believe it’s true. So might the person they heard it from.
And that’s where things get messy because seeing information and verifying information are two very different things. We don’t always make that distinction before adding something to the pile of things we believe. The longer we carry it, the easier it can become to forget exactly where it came from. Something we once saw in a random post can eventually become something we’re pretty sure we read somewhere reliable. After enough time, we may only remember that we know it.
We’re probably even more vulnerable to that when the information fits something we already believe. If I see something online that sounds completely ridiculous to me, there’s a decent chance I’m going to question it. I might look it up specifically because I want to know how anyone came to that conclusion.
But I’m not sure I always bring that same curiosity to something that sounds believable.
If something agrees with what I already think, I don’t have the same immediate reason to challenge it. It fits. Maybe it even gives me another piece of evidence for something I already believed. Accepting it is easy because I don’t have to rearrange anything in my understanding of the world to make room for it.
Sometimes the influence is more deliberate. Information can be presented in ways meant to shape what we think about it. Certain details can be emphasized while others are left out. A message can appeal strongly to an emotion or be repeated until it becomes incredibly familiar. None of that has to control what we think to influence how we see something.
Social media adds another layer because we aren’t even choosing every piece of information we’re exposed to. We choose some of it, of course. We decide who to follow and what to click on. But what we interact with also affects what gets put in front of us next.
Over time, that can create a very particular little window into the world. The people we follow affect what we hear about. What gets shared around us can influence what seems important. If we see the same opinion often enough, it can even start to feel like that’s simply what most people think.
Someone else can spend just as much time online and have a completely different window. Neither person had to consciously decide to build a world where certain information appeared more often. They were just spending time with things that interested them, and little by little, what they were being shown changed.
None of this means people are incapable of thinking for themselves. I’m not even sure thinking for yourself has ever meant being completely free from other people’s influence. Humans learn from each other. We share information and challenge each other’s ideas. Sometimes another person influences us because they know something we don’t, and that’s a good thing.
Being influenced isn’t really the problem. Never noticing it might be.
It’s easy to recognize the things that shape other people’s beliefs. We can see how their families, experiences, and the information they’ve encountered may have influenced the way they see the world. It’s harder to turn that same curiosity toward ourselves.
Because our beliefs have reasons behind them too. Some of those reasons we’ve thought about carefully. Others may have been sitting there for so long that we’ve never thought to examine where they came from.
Thinking for yourself requires being willing to turn the same curiosity toward your own beliefs that you turn toward somebody else’s.
Where did I learn this?
Why does it feel true to me?
What would actually make me change my mind?
Sometimes you may ask those questions and end up exactly where you started. Something doesn’t become wrong just because your parents taught it to you. A belief isn’t automatically less meaningful because someone else introduced you to it first. You can examine something you inherited and decide that, yes, this is still something you choose.
Other times, you may realize you’ve been carrying something you don’t actually believe anymore. Maybe you misunderstood something years ago. Maybe you accepted information you never bothered to check, or you’ve learned enough since then that the old belief no longer makes sense. Changing your mind doesn’t mean you failed some kind of test. You just looked again.
We can’t go back and choose everything that shaped us. We can’t decide what we were taught before we were old enough to question it, and we can’t completely separate ourselves from everything that influences us now. I’m not sure we’d want to. Other people and our experiences are part of how we learn anything in the first place. But we can pay attention to what we’re carrying.
Very few of our beliefs begin entirely with us. Maybe that’s not the question that matters most.
Knowing what you know now, would you choose to keep believing them?
✦ Closing Glimmer
Not every belief you carry began with you. But you still get to decide whether it continues with you.