How Much of Your Life Did You Actually Choose? The Life We Were Taught to Want
I recently finished reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.
It is one of those books you occasionally have to put down. Not because it is dull, but because a single paragraph has quietly unsettled an assumption you never realised you were carrying.
Harari traces the extraordinary story of our species: how a once unremarkable animal came to dominate the planet, build societies and cooperate on a scale no other creature has managed. One of his most compelling arguments is that much of this cooperation rests on our ability to create, and collectively believe in, shared stories.
Money. Nations. Corporations. Laws. Social hierarchies. Systems of authority.
None of these exist in the way a river or a mountain exists. They exist because enough of us agree that they do. Harari calls them imagined orders, realities that live not in nature but in the shared beliefs of millions of people.
That does not make them trivial. A law is not imaginary in the sense that we can simply ignore it, and money may be a social construction, but that will not make the mortgage disappear. Shared stories have very real consequences.
Yet as I closed the book, I found my mind drifting away from the history of humanity and towards something much closer to home.
The history of a single life.
Mine. Yours. And the lives of the many women I have walked alongside in my work as a coach.
Because the same question applies on a smaller, more personal scale, and it becomes more pressing with every passing decade:
How much of the life we are living did we consciously choose, and how much did we simply learn to believe was the life we were supposed to have?
The picture we inherited
Cast your mind back to when you were young. Before the responsibilities, the career, the mortgage, the children if you have them. Before you became the person everybody now recognises.
What did you imagine a successful life would look like?
For many of us, the picture was strikingly similar. Study hard. Find a respectable job. Meet the right person. Marry. Buy a home. Have children. Work hard, be responsible, build some security. Eventually retire. And somewhere along the way, be happy.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that picture. For many people, these are meaningful and deeply satisfying aspirations, and I would never suggest otherwise.
What interests me is how rarely we stopped to ask where the picture came from.
Did we choose it? Or did we absorb it, from our parents, our teachers, our faith, our community, the films we grew up with and the quiet expectations of the generation before us?
Having spent years teaching sociology before I turned to coaching, I have never lost my fascination with this question. Our personal aspirations never develop in a vacuum. We are born into families, cultures and historical moments that shape what we come to see as normal, respectable, desirable and possible.
The sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann described this as the social construction of reality: the process by which the arrangements of a society come to feel less like choices and more like the natural order of things.
We learn what success looks like long before we have the life experience to question the definition. And by the time we are old enough to ask whether we actually agree with it, we may have spent twenty or thirty years faithfully pursuing it.
The rules nobody remembers making
Some of the most powerful rules governing our lives were never written down.
A good mother always puts her children first.
A successful person is always busy.
A respectable adult should have everything figured out.
A woman of a certain age should dress appropriately.
Changing careers in your fifties is reckless.
Starting again is for younger people.
Be grateful for what you have. Don't want too much.
Nobody sat us down and formally taught us these rules. We absorbed them through thousands of small moments: a comment from a relative, a raised eyebrow, a joke at someone else's expense, praise for the woman who conformed, a quiet disapproval of the one who didn't.
Over time, these expectations become so familiar that we stop recognising them as expectations at all. They begin to feel like facts.
And this is where it becomes psychologically interesting. Once we have internalised a rule, society no longer needs to enforce it. We take over the job ourselves.
The voice in your head may not have started as yours
Have you ever felt drawn towards something new, only to hear an immediate chorus of reasons why you shouldn't?
You're too old for that.
What will people think?
You have responsibilities.
Don't be ridiculous.
You should be content by now.
We tend to experience these thoughts as our own sound judgement. Sometimes they are. But sometimes they are echoes: old messages repeated so often that they have quietly moved into our inner dialogue and made themselves at home.
Psychologists have a useful word for this. Introjection describes the process by which we take on the beliefs and standards of others without ever properly examining or digesting them. They sit inside us, borrowed rather than chosen, yet they speak with the full authority of our own voice.
In my coaching practice, this is one of the most common patterns I meet. A woman tells me she can't do something. When we gently explore where that certainty comes from, she often discovers, sometimes with real surprise, that the voice sounds remarkably like her mother, a former teacher or the community she grew up in.
Psychology helps us understand how such beliefs form through relationships, learning and repetition. Sociology widens the lens, showing us the cultural expectations that make those beliefs feel natural. Together, they point to a possibility that is both unsettling and hopeful:
Some of the limitations we experience as personal truths may in fact be inherited expectations we have mistaken for facts about ourselves.
I want to be careful here. Not every limitation is imaginary. Financial obligations are real. Health conditions are real. Caring responsibilities are real. Discrimination and structural inequality are very real, and not everyone has the same freedom to change direction.
But within those realities, it is worth asking whether we are also carrying restrictions that no longer need to govern us.
Why midlife is when the story begins to unravel
There is a reason these questions tend to surface in our forties, fifties and sixties.
Early adulthood is largely a season of construction. We are establishing ourselves, building careers, raising families, creating homes and meeting expectations. There is rarely the time or emotional space to question the whole structure while we are still busy building it.
Then something shifts.
The children grow up and need us differently. Our parents age. Our bodies begin to remind us, sometimes gently and sometimes not, that time is passing. A career that once lit us up begins to feel predictable. A relationship changes. A bereavement confronts us with how temporary everything is.
Or perhaps nothing dramatic happens at all. We simply wake up one morning and realise we have reached an age that once felt impossibly far away.
The psychologist Erik Erikson described midlife as a period in which we begin weighing what we have created and what we still wish to contribute. In my experience, that reckoning often arrives as a set of quiet but persistent questions:
Is this really what I want?
Why am I still doing this?
Who am I trying to impress?
What am I afraid would happen if I changed?
Do I still believe the things I believed when I built this life?
These questions can feel uncomfortable, even disloyal. They can also be enormously liberating. Because there is a world of difference between rejecting the life we have built and examining whether the assumptions it was built upon still hold true for us.
When success becomes its own kind of cage
This is perhaps the most uncomfortable part of the midlife conversation, and one I hear often behind closed doors.
Many women come to me having achieved much of what they were taught to want. The qualifications. The career. The family. The home. The reputation. The financial stability.
And still, something feels missing.
That realisation is often wrapped in guilt. If I have so much, what right do I have to want something else? We tell ourselves that dissatisfaction must be a form of ingratitude.
But gratitude and longing are not opposites. They can, and very often do, live side by side.
You can love your family and still need time that belongs entirely to you. You can appreciate your career and still feel ready for a different challenge. You can be thankful for a stable life and still crave adventure. You can value everything you have built and still recognise that parts of it no longer reflect who you are becoming.
Perhaps the issue is not that we failed to achieve the life we wanted. Perhaps we succeeded, rather brilliantly, in achieving a version of life that was defined for us before we truly knew ourselves.
That is a tender possibility to sit with. Because once everyone sees us as successful in a particular role, changing direction can feel like disappointing an audience we never consciously agreed to perform for.
A pause for reflection
Before you read Part 2, you might like to spend a few quiet minutes with these questions. A journal and a cup of tea are entirely optional, but warmly recommended.
Which parts of your life feel most genuinely chosen, and which feel more inherited?
Whose voice do you hear when you talk yourself out of something new?
Which unwritten rule have you followed the longest without ever questioning it?
Is there an achievement you are proud of that no longer feels like yours?
In Part 2, we will look at what happens next: why understanding where a belief came from is only half the work, how the stories we tell about ageing quietly shape our choices, and how to choose the next chapter more consciously, without simply swapping one script for another.
To be continued........
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