How do we change systems that have taught us who we should be?

We often talk about changing systems as though we stand outside them. But what if the systems we want to change have already helped shape our ideas of who we should become?

We talk a lot about changing systems: changing education, organisations, our economies, government, and the systems contributing to ecological breakdown, inequality and exhaustion. Usually the question is what needs to change *in* the system: its structures, incentives, behaviours, leadership, policies or culture.

But there is another question I keep returning to:

How do we change systems that have taught us who we should be?

Because we don't encounter systems from the outside. We grow up inside them. Long before most of us could question the world around us, we were already learning how to live within it. What counts as success. What makes someone responsible. What kind of knowledge is taken seriously. What a good education should lead to. What makes somebody employable. What it means to contribute. What a successful organisation looks like. What kind of future is realistic to hope for.

Some of these lessons are explicit. Most aren't. They are learned through what gets rewarded and what doesn't. Through who receives recognition. Through what our parents worry about for us, what schools prepare us for and what organisations promote. Through what allows us to earn a living, belong to a group, be taken seriously or feel that we are doing something worthwhile with our lives.

Eventually, much of this stops feeling like something we learned. It simply feels like who we are.

Individually, this becomes identity

We learn ideas about what a good person is, what success looks like, whether we are productive enough, useful enough, accomplished enough. This makes transformation more complicated than changing our minds, because challenging a system can also mean challenging the self that learned how to belong within it.

I have spent twenty years working hard to become successful according to my understanding of success. For years, I was completely taken by the startup mentality: work hard, hustle, keep going. I built my identity around it. Working ninety-hour weeks wasn't only something I did; it became a way of proving my worth, my value, perhaps even my right to belong. For seven years I built that version of myself every day, moving from working with teams to sitting in boardrooms. And eventually that same version of me was being asked to reconsider what arriving even meant.

The same can be true of productivity, expertise, leadership, independence, respectability, even goodness. We may discover that something we want to change in the world has also become part of how we recognise ourselves.

Collectively, identity becomes expectation

But this formation isn't only individual. Groups teach us who we should be too.

There is a good employee, a competent leader, a credible researcher, a responsible parent, a proper citizen, a successful organisation, a serious activist. Even, perhaps, a good changemaker. And we don't only receive these expectations. We reproduce them for one another.

We reward some ways of speaking and quietly dismiss others. We recognise certain forms of expertise more readily than others. We teach newcomers what is realistic here, and we learn which questions can be asked without threatening our place in the group. Often nobody has to enforce the system explicitly. We do some of that work for it.

Not necessarily because we believe the system is right, but because belonging, security, recognition and livelihood are real things. What looks from the outside like resistance to change may sometimes be something much more complicated: people protecting lives they have learned how to hold together.

Culturally, the question becomes much older

Then there is another layer. Where did our ideas of success, progress, growth, rationality, civilisation, knowledge, nature, work and the good life come from in the first place?

They have histories. Some of the categories that now appear ordinary were shaped through particular economic, political and cultural histories, including histories of empire, colonisation and extraction. Ways of knowing were ranked. Particular relationships between humans and the living world became normalised. Particular ideas of development, productivity and progress acquired enormous institutional power.

Over generations, history can disappear into common sense. We inherit ways of organising the world without necessarily inheriting a memory of how they came to be organised that way. Something historically produced can begin to feel inevitable.

But cultural formation becomes especially interesting when the world around us starts to change. Climate disruption, migration, economic insecurity, technological change and political instability don't only challenge institutions. They can unsettle our sense of who we are and what kind of world we belong to.

When familiar ways of life begin to feel less certain, identity itself can become a source of safety. We may hold more tightly to nation, culture, tradition, gender, religion, class or a remembered idea of how things used to be. Not simply because these identities suddenly became more important, but because they can offer continuity when other things no longer do.

In *Doppelganger*, Naomi Klein explores the disorientation created by overlapping crises and the ways far-right movements and conspiracy cultures can respond with powerful stories about identity, belonging, enemies and a world that has supposedly been lost. It makes me wonder whether their appeal can always be understood simply as ignorance or ideology. Stories about who *we* are can also provide coherence when the world itself feels increasingly difficult to recognise.

This doesn't mean nationalism or authoritarianism can simply be explained as fear of change. Their histories are political, economic and material as well as psychological. But it does raise an important question for anyone interested in transformation:

What happens when change threatens not only the systems we depend upon, but the identities through which we know who we are?

Perhaps the more uncertain the world becomes, the more attractive identities that promise certainty can become. And perhaps the more transformation asks us to enter the unknown, the more tightly we may hold onto what tells us where we belong.

This makes transformation a different kind of problem

We try to build a sustainable business and still need it to grow to remain viable. We hope our children will discover what they love and still steer them towards what will help them find work. We know we need rest and still measure ourselves by how much we get done. We want to contribute to something that matters and still spend much of our energy keeping our own lives going.

None of this necessarily feels like reproducing a system. It feels like being responsible.

And that may be where the question becomes difficult enough to be useful. If the systems we hope to transform have participated in forming our identities, our relationships, our expectations of one another and our cultural ideas about what a good life looks like, then transformation cannot simply be something we do to them.

But neither can the answer be that individuals simply need to transform themselves. That would put responsibility back onto people while leaving the conditions that formed them untouched. The question has to move in both directions.

We may need to examine what we have learned to depend upon, what we have learned to protect, what we have learned to desire, and what we have learned to call normal. At the same time, transformation may require changing the conditions that make departing from those expectations costly in the first place. Asking someone to let go of an identity, livelihood, community or source of security is very different from creating conditions in which something else becomes possible.

Which brings me back to the question I started with:

How do we change systems that have taught us who we should be?

And perhaps the question that follows it:

What would have to become possible for us to become otherwise?