Nothing is just background noise!!

Many people think they change at random. Or better yet — they don’t think they’ve changed at all. They look at who they are today, the things they believe, the way they move, the opinions they’ll die on — and they say I’ve always been like this.

You have been deceived.

I know someone like that. For a long time, we were close. But there was always something slightly off about the way he saw things — particularly around relationships, around emotions, around people. He had this whole architecture of beliefs about how feelings work, how people should relate to each other, what emotional intelligence looks like. And he carried it with so much confidence that it took me a while to realise — these aren’t conclusions he arrived at through reflection. These are things that were put in him. Somewhere along the line, something handed him those ideas, and he absorbed them so deeply that they became him. He wasn’t open to being challenged — not because he was a bad person, but because when something has shaped you that deep, questioning it feels like questioning yourself.

Eventually I moved away from him. Not dramatically. Just quietly, the way you step back from something that isn’t good for where you’re trying to go.

But what stayed with me wasn’t him. It was the question he left behind: how much of what I believe was also just put in me, and I never noticed?

Because here’s what I’ve come to understand — your spirit absorbs atmosphere. Quietly. Consistently. Without asking your permission. There’s a reason almost every spiritual tradition across cultures and centuries carries some version of the same warning: guard what enters you. Be intentional about what you allow to settle in your soul. You cannot spend your days consuming things that are dark, cynical, or hollow — and expect light to come out of you. You cannot keep feeding yourself content, music, and people that diminish you — and then wonder why you feel heavy, why peace feels far away, why you keep gravitating toward the same chaos in different forms. The people who carry genuine light — real peace, real warmth that isn’t performed — they’re usually people who have, at some point, been intentional about what they let in. Not perfect. Just paying attention. You don’t drift toward light. You have to be cultivating it.

And then there’s the layer that makes all of this bigger than just personal habits.

A lot of the things we accept as normal today — the ways we think about gender, about class, about race, about who deserves dignity and who doesn’t — are not original thoughts. We didn’t come up with them. We inherited them. Misogyny didn’t start with your generation. Neither did racism, or classism — that quiet belief that some people are simply worth more based on what they have or where they’re from. These are ideas that have been passed down like heirlooms, absorbed through homes, communities, jokes we laughed at as children, things our elders said and nobody questioned. We watched. We listened. We repeated. And then one day someone challenges it, and the response is that’s just how I see things. I’ve always been like this.

But that’s exactly the point.

You see things that way because something taught you to. A culture taught you. A household shaped you. A group of friends normalised it. A song made it sound cool. A film made it look romantic. An algorithm kept serving it to you until it felt like your own conclusion. We are, in ways most of us are still waking up to, the sum of what we have been exposed to.

So the question isn’t whether this is happening to you — it is. It’s happening to all of us, all the time, whether we’re conscious of it or not. The real question is whether you’re paying attention. Whether you’re being deliberate about what you’re letting shape you, or whether you’re just letting the current take you and calling the destination a personal choice.

Look at your playlist right now. Your screen time. The last five people you had a real conversation with. The shows you’ve been watching. The content your algorithm keeps serving you at midnight.

Nothing there is just background noise.

All of it is getting in.