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The idea of a personal website is not revolutionary.

I built this website to encapsulate the things that interest me, be it the projects I work on or the movies I like to watch. The idea, however, was not mine.

I was at a coworking café with a good friend who brought it up. We bounced some ideas back and forth as to what I should include, but we mostly discussed how I can make it uniquely mine. I bought the domain almost immediately.

Weeks later, I stopped to wonder: how many of my choices can be traced back to a specific moment? A moment in conversation, a moment online?

We are inclined to believe our deepest interests and the actions we take are truly ours. It is comfortable to align ourselves with a particular genre of music or to take pride in accomplishing something.

But would it even be possible to act without influence? Is there such a thing as a decision that exists in a vacuum?

If nothing emerges without influence, what is left of originality? Virgil Abloh’s 3% Rule attempts to reconcile this: changing something by just 3% is enough to recontextualize the original and a new piece of work arises from what has come before. Abloh was concerned with fashion design. Does the same apply to how we think?

You did not choose your favorite song. You encountered it. We claim our preferences as markers of our identity. It is simply who we are, right? The truth is these preferences you hold are a collision between you and a set of circumstances you did not design.

The same applies to conviction. The ideas you would defend in an argument, the values you would call non-negotiable. How many of those were seeded? Not planted deliberately, but absorbed over time.

The nature of how children learn embodies this. A child does not arrive with preferences, they are environmentally inherited. They adopt the language, the mannerisms, the fears, and the fascinations of whoever is closest. No child immediately decides to value what they value. They watch, they mirror, and eventually they internalize. At some point, the imitation becomes indistinguishable from identity. The nuanced perspectives we are able to form are heavily attributed to advanced critical thinking.

The interesting part is that we assume this process of absorption stops, maybe in our teens or early adulthood where absorption gives way to genuine authorship. But the mechanism does not change. The inputs get more complex. You move from parents to peers to algorithms. The mirroring becomes much subtler. But it is the same process through a new layer of abstraction, aging.

This assumes that we are born as blank slates, which is false. Epigenetics suggests that experience is inherited biologically. Our DNA is malleable, environmental factors have the ability to alter the genetics that get passed down to descendants. We carry biological responses to events we have not experienced ourselves.

Philosophy offers its own perspective on the matter. Heteronomy refers to the condition of being governed by forces outside the self. Kant positioned it as the opposite of autonomy, something to overcome. But what if it is not a flaw to overcome? What if heteronomy is just the default state, and autonomy is the story we tell ourselves after the fact? Autonomy of the will is not a feeling of freedom. It is the disciplined act of reasoning independently of external determination.

Even the systems we build to think for us reproduce this dependency. A language model trained on human text does not generate something new. It reconstructs patterns from what it was given. Every sentence is a rearrangement of influence. There is no inner voice, just a calibration of math and data. We built a mirror and called it intelligence.

This is not fatalism. It is not that choices do not matter. It is that we are less of an architect of our reality and more of a biased filter. Something that processes what arrives and calls the output original.