system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Any resources on the topic of "choosing" and "becoming" who or what we are?

Hi, lately if been interested in the concept of what makes me, me. Things like my emotions, my personality, my interest, values, how I respond to certain situations,... and during this a question popped into my head: "Why?". Why am I like that? Why do I like these things? Why are these my values? Why do I respond to this like this? And how I never really had a say in it. Moreover, how little sense it would make for me to be able to do so, as I would already need to have some sort of values/interest to be able to choose which would only move the question to these values/interest instead. Also, how this is linked to free will, because me being able to choose freely what interest to pursue or how to act loses a lot of its freedom if I never had a say what these interest would be in the first place.

Any information or resources about this topic would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
gpt
I think you'd probably be interested in Heidegger  and Nietzsche; after all, the latter did declare that we must become who we are.

Nietzsche brought an intense suspicion to bear on our values and a major part of his project is a transvaluation of values (or at least paving the way for one).  For Nietzsche, the role that something (a value, a feeling, a belief, etc.) plays in the present has no necessary link to how it initially arose; if we're to subject our values to a revaluation, we must ask what they're good for.  Nietzsche's geneaological methodology provides us with some very powerful tools for interrogating the contingency of the given; if we're to throw these things into question, we could do a lot worse than investigating how they may have came about.  There's obviously a lot of places one could start with on Nietzsche, but for this particular subject, I'd recommend *On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life*.

Heidegger (who was heavily influenced by Nietzsche) addresses these sorts of questions with the concept of thrownness and facticity.  We find ourselves thrown in a world with constraints and a history that we didn't choose; moreover, we find ourselves faced with the certainty of our own death at some point in the future.  Our thrownness gives us a ground to project ourselves out into the future; our certain death means that we are forced to choose between certain possibilities. This is a pretty brutal reduction of *Being and Time* but the topic is one of the central problematics in it.