Growing Up in a System You Didn’t Choose

 

Growing Up in a System You Didn’t Choose - By Raean

This is the way the world works.

You are born, and then there are rules. They exist before you understand language, before you understand consequence, and before you even understand yourself. They decide how you move, what you can say, what you can become. And that’s the way life works. No one questions it or thinks it’s odd, because what kind of answer can you even get to a question like that? That’s just the way life is.

Obedience is treated less like a decision and more like a starting condition. It’s like when you start playing a new video game and you’re immediately stuck with something you don’t like, but you’re forced to continue anyway. C’est la vie, I guess.

When you’re younger, you don’t question it—not because you’re incapable of questioning, but because you don’t yet see the edges. The system is invisible in the way air is invisible, but we all know it’s there. You live inside it without noticing its shape. You learn how to succeed within it, how to avoid punishment, how to exist without friction. You assume this is simply what reality looks like.

But eventually, awareness arrives.

You realize that every law was written by someone. Not by the universe. Not by some neutral force of moral gravity. By people—people with biases, fears, incentives, and blind spots. People who lived in contexts that no longer exist. And yet their decisions reach forward through time and settle themselves into your life as if they belong there.

It’s unsettling because it means the structure you live inside is not inevitable. It is inherited.

Political theory talks about consent as the foundation of legitimacy. Governments rule because the people consent to be governed. But what does consent mean when you were never asked? When your participation was assumed before you could think, let alone agree? It feels less like consent and more like absorption—like waking up inside a story that was already halfway written.

Again, it’s like starting a new video game. Except you kind of didn’t choose to start. And you can’t quit. You’re expected to continue.

To be clear, this inheritance isn’t purely oppressive. Laws protect as much as they restrict. They create coordination between millions of strangers. They prevent chaos. They allow you to trust that when you step outside, the world will function according to predictable rules. There is comfort in that predictability. There is safety in shared structure.

But safety and legitimacy are not the same thing.

Once you see that the system is constructed, you can’t fully unsee it. You start to notice how arbitrary some boundaries are. How differently your life could have unfolded if you had been born somewhere else. Your freedoms, your risks, your opportunities—all determined by an accident of geography and timing. It forces you to confront how much of your “reality” is contingent, not necessary.

It makes identity itself feel slightly less solid.

You start to realize that what you are allowed to imagine is shaped by what you are allowed to do. And what you are allowed to do is shaped by decisions made long before you existed. It’s like living inside invisible architecture. You can move freely, but only within the rooms that were built for you. And because you’ve never seen the outside, it’s easy to mistake the walls for the horizon.

Most people adapt. Not because they are weak, but because adaptation is rational. Questioning is destabilizing. It introduces uncertainty where certainty used to live. It forces you to acknowledge that authority is not synonymous with correctness. And once you see that, obedience stops feeling automatic. It starts feeling like a moral position.

Not obeying is a choice. But obeying is also a choice. This is the strange psychological space of youth. You are aware enough to see the system, but not powerful enough to meaningfully change it. You exist inside decisions made by people who will never fully experience their consequences. You inherit both their wisdom and their mistakes, without being consulted on either.

And yet, there is something quietly powerful about awareness itself.

Because the moment you realize that laws are not natural but constructed, they stop being untouchable. They become open to examination, to criticism, to revision. The system stops being something that simply exists and becomes something that people sustain, which means it is also something people can reshape. Including you.

Growing up under laws you didn’t choose is, in a way, the first political experience most people ever have. It teaches you what it means to live inside authority before you understand what authority is. It teaches you compliance before it teaches you agency.

But it also gives you something else: perspective.

You begin life as someone governed. But you do not have to remain only that. Eventually, you become someone who participates in shaping the very system that once felt immovable. The rules that once defined you become rules you can question, influence, or refuse to accept without reason.

References

• Gutenberg Project. (n.d.). The Federalist Papers. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7370/7370-h/7370-h.htm

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (n.d.). Rawls, John. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (n.d.). Political Obligation. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/political-obligation/