Voices and Identity
When I was younger, I thought qualities like ambition were things you carried inside yourself. Now I realize it’s much more like a gas: you absorb it from whatever atmosphere you happen to be sitting in.
I frame it as:
Choose your inner circle as if they are choosing your future self, because they are.
Though this isn’t just about people. It applies to anything you let into your head really: books, algorithms, late-night doomscrolling. Your brain adapts to what it’s exposed to, the way your body adjusts to a diet of sugar or vegetables.
It’s quite scary that most people, myself included, treat their mental environment like weather. Just accept whatever’s happening around them. But the people who do exceptional work…the ones who seem to have higher levels of agency and creativity, aren’t passive. They curate their influences like a gardener pulling weeds to make space for seedlings.
If you want to know who you’ll be in five years, don’t look at your goals. Look at what you’re letting into your head today.
Different voice environments produce different types of people. This happens not through our conscious choices, but through a kind of osmosis, we absorb not just accents and vocabulary, but worldviews, ambitions, and identity itself from the voices that surround us.
We tend to think of identity as something that develops from the inside out. We discover our true self, then express it to the world. But what if it mostly works the other way around? What if we internalize the voices around us, and those internalized voices become the self?
1. Academia: The Caveat Industrial Complex
Walk into a seminar room. Every sentence is armored with hedges, “As Foucault suggests…” or “The literature teeeeeentatively indicates…” Survival here requires meta-voice: hedging bets, citing predecessors, preempting peer review. The payoff? A mind exquisitely tuned to spot nuance…but often allergic to the declarative.
2. Wall Street: Certainty as a Second Language
Traders don’t “hypothesize.” They execute. Their lexicon runs on future tense and decimal points: “Q3 upside,” “30% IRR by 2026,” “leveraged buyout.” Immerse here, and your amygdala learns to conflate conviction with competence. Missed predictions are just part of the volatility tax. You might attain a rapid pattern-mapping of risk/reward, but at the cost of a shrunken vocabulary for “I don’t know.”
3. Activism
“Systems, not individuals.” “Solidarity requires…” Activist spaces weaponize unhedged language. Sentences begin with “We demand” not “One might consider.” The brain adapts by developing industrial-strength pattern recognition for power structures, and atrophy in seeing exceptions. (I’m yet to meet a Marxist hedge fund manager?)
Each of these voice environments seem to create different cognitive habits, different emotional responses, and ultimately, different selves.
I think about how this happens in relationships too - how we start to speak in our partner’s voice, adopt some of their frameworks, perhaps even their emotional patterns.
My ex-girlfriend was extraordinarily expressive and had a high degree of openness. She'd squeal with delight over small joys, cry openly at what seemed to be minor disappointments, express anger without hesitation. When we first met, I found this off-putting. To me, a recovering stoic who’d spent years perfecting containment, her transparency felt reckless. Childish, even.
But love is a kind of porousness. A year in, I caught myself falsettoing "yippee!" when a tricky deployment was successful– behaviour that 17 yr old me would have found incredibly cringe. I started moving my hands when I spoke, letting my face reveal what I was feeling instead of maintaining careful neutrality.
Sometimes I wonder if I absorbed these qualities because I secretly craved abandon? Or does loving someone rewire you toward their frequency…I think probably the latter.
How profound is this influence? Let’s think about identical twins raised in different homes. Despite sharing identical DNA, they often develop remarkably different personalities. What differs is not their genetic material but the voice environment they inhabit.
One twin might grow up hearing daily that she's "so smart," creating a self-concept built around intelligence. The other might hear consistently that she's "so kind," developing an identity centered on empathy. Neither message is objectively better, but each will almost certainly create different human beings, with different strengths, vulnerabilities, and blind spots.
Evidence for this influence is strongest if we look at experiences of immigrants' children. First-gen Americans who grow up hearing two distinct voice environments often describe feeling like different people in each language, more assertive in English, perhaps, more deferential in Mandarin. The voices create the self, not the other way around.
You can witness this in your own experience. Notice how differently you think..not just speak, but actually think, when spending extended time with family versus close friends versus professional colleagues. The voices pull your identity in different directions, like planets tugging on a spacecraft. Perhaps this is just me, I have long felt like I was particularly malleable to my environment.
The message a voice environment sends isn't something you can easily turn off or tune out. It's more like air than like music…not something you choose to listen to, but something you inhale without noticing.
A child raised in a home where dinner-table chatter orbits school rankings and mortgage rates will, by 18, possess a radically different ontology than one drowning in debates about Tolstoy and the human experience. The first maps the world as a ladder to climb; the second as a mystery to unravel. Which skill compounds faster?
A friend once claimed their decision to pursue medicine was entirely self-directed, and evangelized about how thankful they were the decision was free from parental pressure.
Of course, both their parents were both doctors.
I don’t think they lied to me, of course they believe that. But how much of their “free will” was pre-coded by 18 years of ambient diagnostics?
We treat our voice environments like tap water: assumed safe, rarely tested. Yet the voices you inhale daily don’t just influence your preferences, they build your subconscious hierarchy of what’s worth preferring. The most powerful propaganda isn’t seedy or coercive. It’s the kind you mistake for oxygen.
Ask yourself: What’s the invisible curriculum of your current environment teaching you to want?
You could think of identity as a sort of portfolio.
Grow up in a Swiss canton or rural Kenya: places where values calcify into shared reflexes, and you’ll gain the efficiency of what we could term cultural liquidity. Everyone prices life in the same currency. But liquidity hates novelty. Voice monocultures forge steeled selves but shrink your option space. You may gain clarity; but you lose bargaining power with life’s complexity.
Say you raise a child in Dubai’s expat clusters or Singapore’s dialectical mashup of Confucian/Malay/British codes, they’ll master cognitive volatility. They hedge across worldviews. But volatility hates conviction.
I don’t think most Amish wonder “Who am I?”, but then again I don’t know many Amish…seems their community answers it at 14. Third-culture kids commoditize selves into situational plugins. One system optimizes for tribal trust, the other for market optionality.
The ones raised in a homogenous voice environment know who they are. The one’s raised in a heterogenous one know how to be. Which is harder to outsource?
The homogeneous environment, I think, creates a stronger, more coherent identity…but often at the cost of narrowness. People raised in voice monocultures develop deep certainty about who they are and what matters, but struggle to understand those raised differently. I sometimes envy religious people or people with that kind of certainty about anything.
The heterogeneous environment creates a more flexible, adaptive self..but sometimes at the cost of inner conflict. Those who grow up hearing genuinely different voices may gain perspective but lose conviction, developing identities that feel contingent rather than solid.
Understanding this influence reveals why finding "your people" matters so much.
When we say someone has found their tribe, what we really mean is they've found a voice environment that nurtures rather than constrains their potential self.
For some, this means escaping voices that continuously broadcast messages of limitation, judgment, or narrow possibilities. For others, it means finding voices that affirm rather than challenge, pushing a comfortable stability rather than disruption.
The most potent voices aren’t charismatic gurus. They’re the ones you encounter on Tuesdays. The colleague who frame work as something they expect to find fullfillment and meaning in. The cousin who asks why you’re still at that job.
I think this is why representation matters in media, literature, and public discourse. It’s a massive coordination problem. For every kid who dismisses their stutter because they’ve never heard a TED speaker with one, we lose a potential Cicero.
Markets in human potential thrive on thick networks of examples, yet we tolerate sparse, homogenous inventories.
Ask yourself: What’s the vibe of your inner circle’s small talk? That’s your futures market.
What does this mean for our own development? It suggests something both liberating and a little scary: to become who we wish to be, we must carefully curate the voices we allow into our minds.
This isn't just about avoiding "negativity" in the self-help sense. It's about recognizing that the podcasts we listen to, the friends we text with, the colleagues we have lunch with, and the content we consume are literally programming our identity…neuron by neuron, day by day.
If you consistently expose yourself to voices obsessed with status, achievement, and external validation, you will almost certainly develop an identity organized around those values, regardless of your philosophical beliefs or stated intentions.
If you surround yourself with voices focused on material acquisition and financial metrics, you will begin to evaluate your own life through that lens, not because you consciously choose to, but because voice environments work on us more like water on rock than like arguments on beliefs.
What I find most surprising is not that voice environments shape identity, but how underrated it is as a variable in life design.
We carefully consider schools for their academic programs but rarely for the voice environment they create (are those really the same thing). We choose careers based on salary and advancement opportunities but seldom consider how the daily voices in that industry will shape who we become. The real cost is the slow accretion of your colleagues’ mental models. Spend a decade among actuaries and you’ll internalize risk aversion as a virtue; among venture investors, overconfidence. Neither is wrong, but the delta between them is non-trivial.
Relationships are probably even higher-stakes. We screen for shared values, but what actually shapes us are the micro-rhythms of a partner’s attention. Do they default to solving or savoring? To “yes, but” or “why not?” These patterns will rewire your priors about human interaction.
The power of voice environments lies in their pre-commitment to repetition. A single conversation rarely moves the needle. But 10,000 hours of exposure to a certain epistemic stance (pessimism as sophistication, say, or contrarianism as sport) will bend your thinking as surely as gravity bends light. You retain agency, but the tax on dissent rises exponentially.
Practical takeaway: Treat your sensory inputs with the same rigor as your financial portfolio. Rebalance periodically. Short the narratives that conflate cynicism with wisdom. Go long on environments where people still blush when caught using a cliché.
Identity is downstream of vocal osmosis.
You might’ve noticed a pattern in long-term couples: over decades together, they begin to sound remarkably similar, adopting each other's phrases, intonation patterns, and even values…It’s always very cute.
This same process explains why certain religious communities, despite theological differences, produce people with similar temperaments. It's not the doctrines themselves but the voice qualities, the cadence of sermons, the tone of prayer, the rhythm of study, that shape adherents.
Three phenomena come to mind:
Why families replicate habits across generations (despite rebellion)
Why corporate cultures outlive turnover (cf. McKinsey, MIT)
How strangers detect tribal kinship in seconds
Simply “values” seems insufficient. Haven’t come up with a great term for it. Vocal osmosis, or maybe just osmosis will have to do for now.
So what do we do with this understanding? I see a few implications:
First, we might approach our voice environments with the same intentionality we bring to other aspects of health. Just as we've become conscious of nutrition and exercise, we could become conscious of our voice diet [though there probably is a better word] deliberately exposing ourselves to sounds that nurture the self we wish to become.
Second, we might recognize voice environment design as a central educational and parenting question. Beyond curriculum and discipline, what voices do we want shaping young identities? What mix of certainty and questioning, affirmation and challenge, tradition and innovation should they hear?
Finally, we might develop more compassion for ourselves and others, recognizing that many aspects of identity we attribute to choice or character are significantly shaped by voice environments we didn't choose. This isn't to deny responsibility but to acknowledge the powerful contextual forces that shape who we become.
The voices that surround us shape who we are in ways more profound than most of us recognize. They construct not just our speech patterns but our self-concept, our sense of possibility, and our deepest values.
Different voice environments produce different types of people, not because we consciously choose to become like what we hear, but because the human brain and identity are fundamentally porous, absorbing and integrating the sounds that consistently surround us.
Understanding this can help us make sense of why certain communities consistently produce similar character types, why we feel like different people in different contexts, and why finding "your people" can feel like finding yourself.
Most importantly, it offers a practical approach to identity development: if you want to become a certain kind of person, immerse yourself in voices that embody those qualities. Over time, almost inevitably, you will begin to hear those voices not just around you but within you.
Do this today:
List the 10 voices you’ve heard most this week (podcasters? Colleagues? That doomscrolling narrator in your head?).
Now ask: Is this the council I’d choose to decide my future self? If not, it’s time to change the channel. The clock ticks and your brain is always recording.
Bottom line:
Identity is a verb, not a noun. You don’t “find” yourself. You assemble yourself, one voice at a time.
Can't say all this and not pull up to SF now
Always a good day to read some of this voice