An evening exploring habit, culture, conditioning, and the strange work of becoming ourselves.
Join the conversation
A modern salon for curious people, complicated questions and conversations that don't fit neatly into a comment section.
No expertise required. No assigned reading. Just bring your curiosity.
October 14
Doors 7 PM / Salon 8 PM
Something to think about
How did you become the person who thinks the things you think?
We like to think of ourselves as self-made.
Our tastes. Our habits. Our ambitions. Our opinions. The thousand little things that make us us. But becoming a person is a strange collaboration.
Long before we were consciously deciding who to be, we were watching, repeating, adapting and practicing. Family taught us things. Culture taught us things. School, religion, geography, friendship, media, class, algorithms — all quietly leaving fingerprints.
So how did we become the people who think the things we think?
We become what we practice.
A self isn't formed all at once.
We become ourselves through repetition: the things we do, the stories we hear, the environments we inhabit, the behaviors that earn approval, the ideas we're exposed to again and again. Some of that formation is deliberate. Much of it isn't.
Which raises an interesting possibility:
What we experience as personality, preference or even conviction may sometimes be the accumulated result of practices we've repeated so often that we've forgotten we were practicing them.
We are shaped by what we repeatedly practice — whether we chose the practice or not.
Who we become isn't only a product of what we believe. It's also a product of what we do, what we encounter, what gets reinforced, and what becomes familiar enough to feel natural.
Agree? Disagree? Good.
Come prepared to make your case.
Are you sure that's your opinion?
- How did you become the person who thinks the things you think?
- Where does personality end and conditioning begin?
- And if repetition helps make us who we are, how much of the self is something we are — and how much is something we've practiced becoming?
We aren't gathering to decide which parts of ourselves are authentic and which aren't. We're gathering to get curious about how a self gets made.
Resources
No homework required
But if you'd like to wander a little deeper before we meet:
READ
You Must Change Your Life, Peter Sloterdijk
A philosophical exploration of practice, repetition and the ways human beings continually train themselves into who they become.
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman
A sociological classic about the roles we perform, the selves we present and how social life participates in shaping identity.
WATCH
The Century of the Self, Adam Curtis
A documentary series exploring how psychology, culture, consumerism and mass media helped shape modern ideas about desire and the self.
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