📣Podcast version of this Memo
A crucial stage to maturity is critically inspecting my parents’ beliefs. Before I start this process, I live through life with a mostly inherited baggage of worldviews and opinions that are not truly mine. No matter how wonderful my parents are, there is a need to find loopholes in their belief system by rebelling against them to avoid making the same mistakes they did.
The first stage is usually physical separation: it facilitates an individualistic search for the new truth. But to be separated physically is not all it takes, because my beliefs stay in my head wherever I am. The second stage is mental separation. That means suspending the beliefs, reconsidering them, and bringing only those back that I understand and can defend.
This post doesn’t call for rebelling against parents. It calls for close examination of beliefs that happen to be mostly formed by parents/background earlier on in our lives. I ask myself: