Saturday 13th January 2018 - Who Am I?

Who Am I?

I'm the sum of all my actions & experiences. As are you. That's a given. Or, is it?

At this point, I have cause to pause for thought. My propensity to O.C.D. would require that two lists are now written, as comprehensive as possible in their scope, to support this statement.

However, since every action creates a reaction, then in our personal worlds this can be said to be an experience. Ergo, we are all simply sums of our individual experiences.

Since we are only in control of the inputs to self to some degree, our character formation is largely beyond our control.

At birth we arrive in the world pre-programmed to accept input from those around us and we must take this at face value since we are unknowing and helpless at this point. Our brains are chiefly concerned with physical functionality but at their most receptive to suggestion. So, we learn quickly from those in our immediate environment. First come the basic social interaction & motor skills such as facial expression & body language in order to start communicating in our world, then walking and taking and so on.

In order to thrive in this world we go on to adopt it's social conventions & belief systems. By the time we are early school age there is not a substantial amount of hard-wiring left to do. We are still open to any amount of new input but we have come to trust and rely on our own small social group of family & friends to such an extent that acceptance of alternative views & behaviours will be hard to accept. We may derive much benefit from a good teacher at this stage, while we still accept adults as oracles.

My assertion then is that personality is duly formed by this point. The programming (brainwashing) base is in place and we will simply build on this foundation for the rest of our lives, barring a particular emotional shock or concerted effort to change.

Have we ever been in control of our own lives or were our paths mapped out, with the occasional diversion along the way, for us before we knew any better?

I could go on to recant personal experience that I believe may have shaped me here but I think that's enough digression for now and some of those events will have been covered in previous posts. My next entry will be a simple view of the world in terms of my likes and dislikes, which this was intended to be before the mind wandered.

Thank you for getting this far. As always, I would welcome any feedback you might be willing to provide but as previously mentioned I believe these posts are only being scraped by robots, not humans.