How Do You Separate What You Want From Cultural Programming?

Bill Perkins says a lot of what he thought he wanted was marketing from society or the movies, absorbed until it felt like taste. Fried crickets seem repulsive to him only because he did not grow up eating them. If he had grown up in China, he would be asking when he could get some. The foods he likes and the things he does were programming, not something he was born wanting.

Not all of that programming is bad. Some of it he likes, so he copies it and repeats it. A lot of it did not fit what he actually wanted, and sorting his values from the old script was going to take time. He was not going to drop twenty-some years of programming in a day. For any stimulus there are many possible responses. He keeps the ones that work for his goals and drops the ones that do not. In that exercise, right and wrong means whether the response serves the life he is trying to build.