Unfiltered Real Talk

Unfiltered Real Talk

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Unfiltered Real Talk
Unfiltered Real Talk
Manufactured Meaning

Manufactured Meaning

How We Learn to Believe

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Todd Baratz
Jul 12, 2025
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Unfiltered Real Talk
Unfiltered Real Talk
Manufactured Meaning
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What if I told you that most of what you believe about yourself and this life—what’s good, bad, worthy, broken, healthy, shameful, or desirable—is not the result of personal discovery, but cultural inheritance? That who you think you should be has more to do with history, politics, and collective norms than some essential truth? That what we call "truth" is often just a story we’ve collectively agreed to tell for now?

We live inside a manufactured world of meaning. It’s easy to think our beliefs are personal or permanent. But they’re not. They’re historical, cultural, political. And they shift. Not just over centuries, but sometimes overnight. From what we eat to how we date, from how we diagnose pain to how we define purpose, every part of our lives is shaped by the moment we’re living in. The values we carry are not universal—they’re era-specific, culturally specific, sometimes even algorithmically specific. And this applies just as much to our deepest emotional narratives: how we love, how we heal, how we think we’re supposed to feel whole.

So I want to zoom out and offer something broader. It’s important to understand just how historical, cultural, and political our lives really are. What we take as personal truths are often inherited frameworks. The shame we feel? The pressure to be happy or healed? The idea that love must look a certain way? These are not facts. They are constructions. They are reflections of the values, economies, and power structures of the era we live in. Which also means: they are malleable. They can change. They have changed. They will change again.

Across history, we’ve seen massive shifts in how we understand ourselves and our place in the world. In ancient times, philosophy was the primary lens through which we interpreted life. Think Plato, Aristotle, Confucius. They weren’t influencers or therapists, but early guides trying to answer the big questions: What is the good life? What does it mean to be virtuous? What is real? What is the self? Philosophy, at its core, was a process of asking. It was about embracing ambiguity, learning to live inside contradiction, and understanding that complexity doesn’t require resolution. It didn’t promise answers so much as it modeled how to think.

I tend to favor this kind of thinking—even as a therapist steeped in “scientific” thought, whatever that really means. What draws me to philosophy is its expansiveness. Its tolerance for uncertainty. Its reverence for unanswerable questions. Philosophy doesn’t offer easy solutions; it invites us to sit with nuance, to hold multiple truths at once, to ask better questions. That’s what makes it feel honest.

Then came religion.

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