You did not arrive at your opinions through independent reasoning. You absorbed them. The music you love was introduced to you. The food you prefer was placed in front of you at a formative age. The political position you hold was shaped by who raised you, who you spent time with, what you were afraid of, and what you were rewarded for saying. This does not make you a fraud. It makes you human.
Humans are porous. We take in what surrounds us. The problem is not the absorption. The problem is mistaking the absorbed material for original thought. The person you call yourself is largely a sediment of influences. Family. Culture. Schooling. Peers. Media. Fear. Desire. Each left a layer. The layers compacted. You call the result your personality, your values, your identity.
But if you trace any of it back far enough, you find something external at the origin. This matters because most of the things you feel most strongly about, you feel strongly about for reasons you did not choose. The conviction is real. The origin of the conviction is not yours. None of this means your values are wrong or your preferences are invalid. It means they are not entirely yours in the way you assume they are.
There is a difference between living by values you have examined and living by values you absorbed and then stopped questioning. Most people are doing the second thing and calling it the first.
