Personality Basins

> A common mistake in life is to let your personality basin solidify too early. Your parents and schooling environment have a disproportionately large influence on who you become as an adolescent.

> But as soon as you gain the freedom to act independently as an adult, it’s usually a good idea to force yourself to try as many new things as you can, including moving cities (or countries!) and considering drastically different lines of work. ...

Oh dear, I'm beginning to fear that the author's personality has been captured by global capital...

And what if it's personality capture all the way down, i.e. that you've got to be personality captured by someone? In that case, the closest you can get to a choice is whether it's your parents, religion, or someone/something else. While the integrity of your parents may vary, there is a subjective argument that they've got a better incentive to steer you into an optimal basin than anybody, relatively speaking.

> there is a subjective argument that they've got a better incentive to steer you into an optimal basin than anybody, relatively speaking

Many parents do not have their kids best interest at heart; from religious fanatics to divorced parents using their kids as pawns to failed athletes living vicariously through their "he'll be in the NHL someday" fantasies to just parents who didn't want have kids and don't care at all.

Then there a whole slew of parents who genuinely want what is best for their kids but won't succeed due to incompetence or their own issues with drug addition or passing on generational trauma.

The quotation in the GP’s post does seem to evince little appreciation (if not outright disdain) for ties to family and local community across the generations. But what if the potential harm caused to some kids by bad parents, is an unavoidable part of the social-cohesion benefits to all society that would be caused by young people not moving far away?

I don’t necessarily want to have a dog in this fight myself. But I immediately thought of how that quotation would jar with some cultures represented on HN, where children stay close to parents all their lives and it is widely felt that the West is doing it wrong.