We’d like to think of ourselves as independent thinkers or original creatives. “I would be the same even if I were born in Morocco in the 1800s” feels true. What is probably also true is that the other “you”, the hypothetical Moroccan, would feel the same.

I would argue that this feels true because we have ever only attended to the circumstances we were in. How could we ever be a different us? It is worth keeping in mind, though, that all our experiences form us in a way or another. Our brains are neuroplastic, which means that they are constantly changing. This also means that what we attend to will leave a trace in us. Over time, this influence also affects what we pay attention to and how we make sense of the world. It becomes the lens through which we view the world.

So the current you, the one deciding what’s worth your attention, is downstream of everything the past you attended to. The evaluator is itself a product of what it’s evaluating. There is no version of you standing outside this loop. In essence, you are both the sculptor and the stone.

In no way am I trying to make anyone reading this feel trapped, stuck in loops outside of your control. I don’t believe in that. I do believe, however, that environments have a strong formative effect on our internal wiring, which is why “try harder” is not helpful most of the time if we want to change negative patterns residing in ourselves. This, I think, is the message that is really powerful: you can change what surrounds you, and what surrounds you slowly builds who you become.

Making your surroundings work for you is perhaps more important now than ever in our attention economy. Feeds, ads, the endless click-chase, these aren’t neutral surroundings; they’re environments engineered to hold your attention, built by people whose interests aren’t yours. A lot of smart people have responded with digital minimalism: cut it back, delete the apps, go quiet. The subtraction helps: it gives us opportunities to more easily shift focus, but we still have to point it somewhere else, digital or not.

When I set out to become better at programming for the second time, I didn’t just study it; I tried to engineer the surroundings so the learning would happen to me. I had structured courses on boot.dev, and I subscribed to programming creators on YouTube, not just the tutorials but the entertainment, so that even when I wasn’t trying, the feed was still pointed at code. I also built my own small tools, and each one made me into someone who could see the next. I was creating positive associations, building a reinforcing loop around an identity I wanted to live inside before I could prove I deserved it, which is, I think, the only way anyone grows into one. And it worked: I started building my own things; small tools, websites, things I now use at work.

Picture that other Jonathan, born in Morocco in the 1800s. He wakes before dawn, works the trade his father worked, prays when everyone around him prays, and is every bit as certain as I am that he sees the world as it plainly is. His attention was fed by what surrounded him, and it built a man who’d find my certainties as strange as I find his. That’s the point I want to make here: I wouldn’t be the same person born into his world. Context isn’t only something that happens to you; it’s also something you can adjust. You are not only where you began, and from here, some of what builds you next is yours to choose. The question is, who would you like to become?