Let’s begin with a basic reality of life: We are all victims of our upbringing and the culture in which we grow up. We didn’t get to choose our parents, siblings, extended families, where we lived, where we went to school, the activities we participated in, or the conditions of our early lives. Rather, our upbringings were the universe that enveloped us from birth. Every value, attitude, belief, emotion, behavior, and ways of interacting that was a part of our upbringings was absorbed into our psyches.

In turn, you can think of culture as the attitudes and norms of a particular social group. When we usually think about culture, we tend to think in a larger context that includes our popular and media cultures, and the large institutions that shape our lives—for example, those of religion, politics, and education—by which we are surrounded early in our lives. These bigger forces certainly have a significant impact on who we become because, as social beings with a strong need to feel a part of a group, we naturally accept the cultural messages that we hear most frequently.

At the same time, there are other more “micro” cultures that also influence the way we view ourselves and our world, including our family culture and the cultures of our daily lives, including sports, arts, hobbies, internet-related activities (e.g., texting, social media, online games), as well as friendships, peers, and adult groups with whom we are regularly in contact. All of these smaller cultural forces shape us in subtle, yet indelible, ways.

Hopefully, most of those influences from our upbringing and culture were positive, thus contributing to our healthy personal development. Unfortunately, an unfortunate reality of life is that neither our upbringing nor the culture within which we were raised are entirely free of toxins. Particularly with the ubiquity of the internet, unhealthy messages about wealth, success, celebrity, power, status, consumption, and beauty are ever present in the lives of most of us, especially those who are young.

As a result........

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