"So, you wake up one morning and realize that you’re not the person you wanted to be. You’re someone else. You wonder how it happened. You look back upon your life, which appears to you as a caterpillar-track of choices you’ve made, most of which seemed right at the time – perhaps even inevitable – but that, one by one, have narrowed your corridor.

But it does suggest that your choices might not have been as free as they’d felt; that they’d been made under a heavy yet invisible genetic influence; that your soul is possessed by dead ancestors, who, working in conspiracy with the ghosts of your culture, mostly win.

Western culture prefers us not to believe we’re defined or limited. It wants us to buy the fiction that the self is open, free, nothing but pure, bright possibility; that we’re all born with the same suite of potential abilities, as neural ‘blank slates’, as if all human brains come off the production line at Foxconn. This seduces us into accepting the cultural lie that says we can do anything we set our minds to, that we can be whoever we want to be. This false idea is of immense value to our neoliberal economy.

We’re not all constructed from the same precision-tooled machine parts. We haven’t all been equally, perfectly designed to face the challenges of our environment. We’re lumps of biology, mashed and pounded into shape by mostly chance events. Our ‘human potential’ is limited.

The stories of our neoliberal tribe insidiously persuade us that there’s an ideal form of self and then defines it for us. We internalize this story and this hero. We make our tribe’s story our story. We spread it around, in our own gossip and storytelling, becoming unconsciously complicit in the conspiracy. And then we try to become this hero – forcing ourselves into its shape, in the gym, in the office, on the therapist’s couch."

(From: Will Storr: "Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed" )