Kien Nguyen
Self discovering or being taught to
You give yourself meaning to the subject that you're wondering about
vs
Watch online content telling you how to think about that subject.
For the majority of my life, the values that I adopted for myself were taught to me by the outside world.
My parents taught me how to behave, what's right and wrong. Then when the age came, school started teaching me those things as well.
That was my only way to understand what the world is about.
My parents and school also share a similar trait: It was difficult for me to ask them life questions, you know, the ones that are not trivial and hard to answer.
So I understood life just as my school and parents told me to, and when I questioned something about life that I didn't understand, I shoved that question away, because there wasn't any way for me to know the answers.
Fast forward a bit, and the internet has entered my life.
I learned to seek answers to my trivial questions by searching up Reddit, YouTube, and when I'm really desperate, Quora.
The discourses on Reddit, the personal opinions from the Youtubers, and the general opinions from the recommended books are the values I shape my life around.
Things were good, I felt like I knew what I was doing, and that I was making more right decisions by aligning them with other people's opinions.
Adopting other people's opinions works well, until they stop working.
No matter how sound the opinions of others are at the start, at some point, I can't relate to them anymore, or I just straight up forget them without any second thought.
Time after time when this happens, I begin my search again for the answers that I wanted to hear, like it has never happened.
On one hand, it has become a bad web browsing addiction.
On the other hand, my questions were still not satisfied, and I was still lost without any value in my life to live by.
But for a while, after I understand that there's nothing that's absolutely true, I begin to form a set of values for myself, by myself.
Because these values are made based on the things I've seen and done, they are obviously relatable to me, and I have more trust in it than listening to yet another stranger's opinion talking about experiences that are nothing close to me.
And with this trust, I've been able to live by the value set better and reduced the amount of confusion around the subjects of my values.
I've also been able to stop seeking for advices from non-relatable and un-credited people.
This contributes to both the confidence in myself, and reduces my bad internet browsing habits.
It took me a while to understand that this is how it should've been done from the start, but I'm glad that I've arrived at this realization.
I will keep up my set of beliefs by reviewing them and making new ones when it's necessarily.
This is how a person lives with integrity.