Free choice — choosing our environment

Question from the Internet:

“How is individual identity shaped by collective knowledge?”

We do not actually have an individual identity as we imagine. We are the product of the environment we exist in.

We are like individual screens, displaying the values, goals, aspirations, behavioral patterns of our immediate and larger environment through our own individual qualities.

Let us say one is a Samsung screen, another one is an LG, the third is a Sony, the next might be a Panasonic and so on. How we display what we display, the colors, the resolution, the size, and the expressions might differ, but the content is uploaded from the environment.

This is why our only true “free choice” in life is choosing the environment that will shape, tune us. In fact, even that is not totally free, since different circumstances and our reactions to them lead us from environment to environment. What we can choose is which environment we start actively helping, strengthening, elevating, intensifying around us so its influence on us would become stronger than the influence of all other environments.