I concede you have a point there. My opinions are colored by my experiences.
As a personal story that I will share since it also has value as an experiment: I did not see my father between the ages of 0-3 and 7-19. That means he was not there for a large part of my developmental phase, in which I formed a lot of my viewpoints on the world (at the time, obviously).
What astounded me was that when I met him, he shared a lot of those viewpoints. A lot of my behaviour that I thought was specific to me, was not. Even small things like preference for walking etc. I will not list everything obviously but it really ingrained in me that a lot of what I considered "my identity" was not chosen in any way by me. We grew up in rather different environments/countries too.
I think most humans would rather not face the fact that their identity is scarcely chosen. But learning to accept that means you can experience a lot more, since your ego doesn't mind losing parts that aren't "really part of it" anyway. Or at least it's less scary.
As a personal story that I will share since it also has value as an experiment: I did not see my father between the ages of 0-3 and 7-19. That means he was not there for a large part of my developmental phase, in which I formed a lot of my viewpoints on the world (at the time, obviously).
What astounded me was that when I met him, he shared a lot of those viewpoints. A lot of my behaviour that I thought was specific to me, was not. Even small things like preference for walking etc. I will not list everything obviously but it really ingrained in me that a lot of what I considered "my identity" was not chosen in any way by me. We grew up in rather different environments/countries too.
I think most humans would rather not face the fact that their identity is scarcely chosen. But learning to accept that means you can experience a lot more, since your ego doesn't mind losing parts that aren't "really part of it" anyway. Or at least it's less scary.