Our parents didn’t sit around plotting how to mess us up. They just handed us the exact same script they were handed, because it was the only one they had. We are all just products of our environment, running on programming we never asked for.
Think about how it starts. From ages zero to seven, a kid’s brain is a sponge. We trust our parents implicitly; we trust that they don’t lie to us, and as children, we generally don’t challenge their beliefs. It’s not just harmless nonsense like Santa Claus—many parents offload their own baggage and fears onto their kids. Don’t go near that spider, it’ll bite you. They make sure their children’s “escape from harm” is engineered to match their own anxieties. Add in punishment and the constant threat of punishment, and you create a lifetime of negative reinforcements designed to keep you in line. If the adults you trust most will lie to you or use fear to control you, what else are they lying about?
In my case, it was a Catholic upbringing. I was told there’s an invisible guy in the sky keeping score, by parents who never even cracked open a bible. I spent twenty years believing it just because everyone nodded along. Meanwhile, I had a grandmother telling me I was going to burn in hellfire for eternity. That does a real number on a kid’s developing brain. It’s constant psychological blackmail designed to keep you terrified and compliant.
We were raised to bow down to authority. Never question a priest. Never question the police. They can do no wrong, right? Except that blind worship is exactly how massive generations-long cover-ups of abuse happen. They taught us to respect the badge and the collar while handing us a fake fiat dollar and telling us to be proud of it. It’s all a rigged game.
We aren’t raised to think. We’re raised to obey. Our parents told us there are certain things you just don’t question, because their parents told them the same damn thing. By middle childhood, those downloaded rules turn into a permanent worldview, setting us up to auto-pilot the exact same mistakes.
I started waking up in my early twenties. By the time most people are settling down to have kids, I looked around and realized I was living in a pod of lies. And that’s when I made a choice: I wasn’t going to have children. I refused to bring a kid into this world just to lie to them, mentally abuse them, and force them into a system I wanted no part of. I wanted no part in passing the poison down the line.
You want to know what real critical thinking is? It’s not some magical free will. It’s sitting down, looking backward at the exact environment you were grown in during those formative years, and tracing how every single brick of your worldview was laid by someone else. Once you see the cage, you can’t unsee it.
Burying your head in the sand and hoping it goes away? That has never worked.