On Being Formed

Come read with me — quietly, slowly, deeply

You can find more essays in this series in the Conversations archive

There are moments when a life no longer feels wrong — just narrow.

Not broken.
Not dramatic.
Simply shaped in ways you didn’t consent to, and are no longer willing to live inside.

Most people don’t arrive at this realisation through thought.
They arrive through discomfort.
A quiet resistance.
A sense that the person they are becoming was decided long before they had a say.

Some of the most consequential moments in a life do not arrive as insights.
They arrive as decisions made before we have language for them.

A restlessness that won’t settle.
A sense that the life we’re living is shaping us into someone we don’t quite recognise.
A quiet knowing — often wordless — that the way we are being formed no longer fits.

When I read Modern Times, I don’t experience discovery.
I experience recognition.

Not because the ideas are new — but because they are old, familiar, and still largely unheeded.

Across centuries, thinkers have named the same human pattern again and again:
we are shaped long before we believe we are choosing — by family histories, cultural expectations, economic pressures, reward systems, pace, and the unspoken rules of belonging.

This is not framed as a personal failure.
It is a structural feature of human life.

And that is precisely why these texts continue to speak.

Formation Happens Quietly

We like to imagine ourselves as choosing individuals.
We tell ourselves we decide — our careers, our values, our lifestyles, our beliefs.

But long before choice appears, something else is already underway.

We absorb.

We absorb what our parents were shaped to believe.
What schools quietly reward.
What work structures demand.
What society praises, tolerates, or ignores.

Formation rarely feels like instruction.
It feels like normal.

This is why the question is not simply whether we are free.
It is whether we have ever been formed to use freedom well.

A person can function efficiently — earn, adapt, perform — while remaining inwardly dependent.
Not immoral.
Not weak.
Simply unformed in the deeper sense: reliant on habit, urgency, slogans, and external cues rather than judgment.

That danger is not new.
It was already visible decades ago.
And centuries before that.

This line lands with a quiet shock — not because it is obscure, but because of how easily it is misunderstood.

I know that misunderstanding well.

For years, I took it to mean something else entirely.

Leisure, here, is not idleness.
It is not escape.
It is not reward.

It is the condition under which reflection becomes possible — where experience is reorganised into understanding, where a person becomes capable of judgment rather than reaction.

A well-formed mind is not one that knows everything.

It is one that can:

– understand what it is doing
– grasp why it is doing it
– judge what makes its work good or poor
– see how effort affects others
– recognise how personal labour fits into a wider human whole

Without this, work fragments a person.
With it, work becomes humanising.

Education, then, is not something finished when earning begins.
It continues as long as a person is still becoming capable of judgment, responsibility, and depth.

And this is where the tension sharpens.

Because the very thing Adler insists is necessary for formation — leisure — is the thing modern life most systematically erodes.

Not by banning it, but by hollowing it out.

When We Never Pause

Modern life rarely questions pace.
It rewards motion.

Leisure is reduced to recovery — rest just long enough to return to production, or distraction that fills the quiet rather than deepens it.

Under these conditions, people can believe they are rebelling against expectation while still being shaped by it — formed by urgency, productivity, and constant stimulation rather than by understanding.

Freedom becomes shallow not because it is abused, but because the inner capacity required to hold it was never cultivated.

This is not an accusation.
It is an invitation to notice.

Because when formation goes unexamined, choice becomes narrower than it appears — exercised within limits we never consciously chose.

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What is shaping me — daily, quietly, repeatedly — into the person who will choose?

Not as an accusation.
Not as a task.
Just as a question worth living with.

Come read with me — quietly, slowly, deeply.