None of us chose where we started. We did not pick our parents, our first language, the town we grew up in or the beliefs that were normal in our house. By the time we were old enough to ask whether those beliefs were right, they were already shaping how we saw everything else, including the question itself.
The first two posts in this series looked at the practical side: an exercise for sorting the rules you live by, and the psychology of why it works. This piece steps back. The question of whose values we are living by did not begin with psychology. Philosophers have been working on it for more than two thousand years, and what they found still helps.
Understanding backwards, living forwards
The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote in his journals that life can only be understood looking backwards, but has to be lived going forwards. It is a simple observation with an awkward consequence. We make sense of who we are by looking at where we have been, and much of where we have been was decided by other people. So the story we tell about ourselves is partly borrowed before we start telling it.
Kierkegaard also wrote about the anxiety that comes with freedom, describing it as a kind of dizziness. When we realise we could choose differently, the ground moves a little. One reason inherited rules are so comfortable is that they spare us that dizziness. If the rule says what to do, there is nothing to decide.
No meaning arrives attached
The French writer Albert Camus started from a blunt position. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he argued that the world does not hand us a meaning. We want one, and the world stays silent. He called the clash between our need for meaning and that silence the absurd.
Camus did not treat this as a reason for despair. His point was that once you stop expecting meaning to be supplied, you are free to make it, and you can keep living fully while some questions stay open. This matters for inherited values. Many of the rules we carry were someone else's attempt to supply a meaning: work hard and you will be safe, put others first and you will be loved. Camus would say these are human answers to a silent world, made by people doing their best. That makes them worth respecting, and it also means they can be revised.
Accepting what you were not asked about
Friedrich Nietzsche is often misread, and much of what is said about him online is wrong. Two of his ideas fit this subject closely.
The first is about accepting what we did not choose. Nietzsche wrote about learning to see what is necessary in our lives as something we can work with, instead of something to resent. He called this amor fati, a Latin phrase meaning love of fate (Nietzsche, 1882/1910). In practice, it means taking the starting point you were given, including its rules, and using it as material instead of wishing it away. The subtitle of his late book Ecce Homo is "How One Becomes What One Is". Becoming, in his sense, starts with what you already are, inheritance included.
The second idea is about action. In The Gay Science (section 41), Nietzsche argued that a thoughtful person treats their actions as attempts and questions, ways of finding something out. Success and failure are both answers. That is the logic of the last step of the values exercise. Breaking one old rule for a week is a question put to the world, and whatever comes back is information.
The stance you take
Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camps, wrote that even when people cannot change their circumstances, they still choose the attitude they take towards them. In Man's Search for Meaning, he argued that meaning can be found in what we do, in what and whom we love, and in the stance we take towards suffering we cannot avoid (Frankl, 1959/2006).
Frankl's point extends to inherited values. You cannot change what you were taught. You can choose how you stand in relation to it: which parts you keep and live out deliberately, which you set aside, and which you rework into something that fits the life you have now.
What is yours to decide
The Stoics, writing in Greece and Rome two thousand years ago, drew a line through everything. The teacher Epictetus opens his handbook by dividing the world into what is up to us and what is not. Our judgements, intentions and choices are ours. Our bodies, reputations and the opinions of others are not (Epictetus, c. 125/1890).
Inherited rules often try to control what lies on the wrong side of that line. "Never let anyone down" is an attempt to control how others see you, which is not up to you. The Stoic move is to redirect the effort towards what is yours: how you act, and why. "I want to be reliable when I have said yes" sits on your side of the line. "Nobody can ever be disappointed in me" does not.
Where psychology meets philosophy
Modern research has arrived at similar conclusions by a different route. Self-determination theory, developed by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, describes how values move from being imposed to being owned. A rule starts outside us, gets swallowed whole, and can then be examined and either integrated or let go (Ryan & Deci, 2000). That is close to Nietzsche's becoming, described in the language of experiments.
Research on goals shows that letting go of a goal that no longer fits, and finding a new one, is linked to better wellbeing than holding on (Wrosch et al., 2003). And studies of meaning suggest that much distress comes from a gap between how we believe life should be and how it is (Park, 2010). Inherited rules often set the "should". Changing the rule can close the gap from the other side.
The philosophers supply the question and the stance. Psychology supplies evidence that examining what we were given, and choosing again, is good for us. Neither asks you to throw everything out.
The new inheritance
There is a modern twist. Our grandparents inherited their rules from family, church and community. We still do, but we also take in a steady stream of new ones from screens. Be productive. Optimise your mornings. Find your passion. Never settle. These arrive with the same confident tone as the old rules, and they are no more likely to be ours. Camus's point applies to them too. They are someone's answer, offered with certainty. Whether they are your answer is a separate question.
A writing practice
If you want to take this further than the six-step exercise, try this. It takes about twenty minutes.
Write the life you were handed. At the top of a page, write "The life I was told to want". Underneath, describe it in a paragraph: the job, the home, the kind of person, the kind of success. Write it as the people who raised you, or the culture around you, would have described it.
Write the life you would choose. On a second page, write "The life I would choose, knowing what I know now". Describe it in the same way. Don't edit for realism yet.
Mark the overlap. Compare the two pages and underline what appears on both. These are inherited values you have also chosen. They are likely to be your strongest.
Name one difference. Pick one thing that appears on the second page only. Write one small action that would move you towards it this week, and when you will do it.
The overlap is often larger than people expect. That is worth knowing too. Choosing your values does not mean rejecting everything you were given. It means looking at it and deciding.
Some people find this easier to do with someone asking the questions alongside them. If that would help, the first conversation with us is free.
If this was useful, feel free to share it.
References
Epictetus. (1890). The enchiridion (G. Long, Trans.). In The discourses of Epictetus. George Bell & Sons. (Original work written c. 125)
Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man's search for meaning. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1959)
Nietzsche, F. (1910). The joyful wisdom (T. Common, Trans.). T. N. Foulis. (Original work published 1882)
Park, C. L. (2010). Making sense of the meaning literature: An integrative review of meaning making and its effects on adjustment to stressful life events. Psychological Bulletin, 136(2), 257–301. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018301
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68
Wrosch, C., Scheier, M. F., Miller, G. E., Schulz, R., & Carver, C. S. (2003). Adaptive self-regulation of unattainable goals: Goal disengagement, goal reengagement, and subjective well-being. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29(12), 1494–1508. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167203256921
Further reading
Camus, A. (2005). The myth of Sisyphus (J. O'Brien, Trans.). Penguin. (Original work published 1942)
Kierkegaard, S. (1938). The journals of Søren Kierkegaard (A. Dru, Trans.). Oxford University Press.
Nietzsche, F. (1911). Ecce homo (A. M. Ludovici, Trans.). T. N. Foulis. (Original work published 1908)
