We are born into a body, gender, culture, religion, and more, and spend the rest of our life defending those identities.
– paraphrased, source unknown
I saw a similar quote on Facebook and forgot to write the quote down and also the name of the source. (The reason may be that I liked the idea, but not the way it was phrased.)
There is a lot of truth to this. Most of us are born into a gender, culture, religion, politics, class, and views on all sorts of things, we adopt most or all of these (identify with these identities), and spend the rest of our life defending them. Sometimes as if it was a matter of life and death.
We defend something we were randomly (or so it seems) born into, that were initially created and imagined by someone and then passed on.
It’s understandable, and also a bit silly seen from this perspective.