I know that sounds disrespectful.
Hear me out.
Holidays.
The 40-hour workweek.
Superstitions.
Religion.
Language.
Family traditions.
Social expectations.
So much of the way we live our lives was decided before we ever got here.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
In fact, passing things from one generation to the next is one of the reasons human beings have been able to build societies in the first place.
Imagine if every generation had to start over.
Imagine every baby being born and having to invent language again.
We’d never get anything done.
Language works because the people around us generally agree that certain sounds and symbols mean certain things.
Holidays give us designated times to gather, celebrate, remember, mourn, or simply be together.
Traditions connect families across generations.
Religious traditions can give people community, meaning, moral frameworks, and a way of understanding experiences that are difficult to explain.
Institutions allow knowledge and systems to survive longer than the individual people who created them.
We don’t have to reinvent everything because somebody came before us.
Inheritance is one of humanity’s superpowers.
But here’s the problem.
We don’t only inherit the good stuff.
Think about two phrases we hear all the time:
Generational wealth.
Generational trauma.
They’re very different things, but they’re passed down through essentially the same mechanism.
Something happened before you got here.
And you inherited the consequences.
One family might pass down property, money, financial knowledge, connections, businesses, or opportunities.
Another family might pass down fear, unhealthy relationship patterns, financial instability, prejudice, silence, or unresolved pain.
Most families probably pass down some combination of both.
We inherit the things that helped the people before us survive.
And sometimes we inherit the things they never figured out how to heal.
But families aren’t the only things that pass down an inheritance.
Societies do it too.
We inherit laws.
Institutions.
Economic systems.
Political structures.
Ideas about work.
Ideas about family.
Ideas about gender.
Ideas about success.
Ideas about education.
Ideas about authority.
Ideas about what a “good life” is supposed to look like.
And because those things were already here when we arrived, they can start to feel less like choices people made and more like the natural order of the world.
Take the 40-hour workweek.
Most of us don’t wake up in the morning wondering why a standard full-time workweek is approximately 40 hours.
It’s just…work.
Five days on.
Two days off.
Eight-ish hours a day.
Normal.
But why?
Why 40?
Why not 32?
Why not 50?
Why five days instead of four?
I’m not arguing here that 40 hours is necessarily good or bad.
I’m asking something different:
Why does it feel natural when it’s actually a system human beings created?
We usually think of traditions as Thanksgiving dinners, wedding customs, holiday decorations, family recipes, religious ceremonies, or something your grandmother insisted everybody do every year.
But tradition is bigger than that.
Some traditions wear costumes.
Others wear suits.
Some traditions are so deeply embedded in our institutions that we don’t recognize them as traditions at all.
They’re just “the way things are.”
And I think there’s an important difference between saying:
This is how things are.
and saying:
Human beings before me decided to organize things this way, and generations afterward continued participating in it.
Because once you understand that something was constructed, you also understand that it can be examined.
And that’s where things get uncomfortable.
Because we tend to give the past a certain amount of authority simply because it’s the past.
We say things like:
“That’s how we’ve always done it.”
“My mother did it this way.”
“That’s how I was raised.”
“It’s tradition.”
And sometimes that’s enough to end the conversation.
But should it be?
Something surviving for a long time tells us that generations of people continued doing it.
It doesn’t necessarily tell us why.
Maybe it worked.
Maybe it was useful.
Maybe people loved it.
Maybe nobody questioned it.
Maybe questioning it came with consequences.
Maybe the original reason for doing it disappeared 100 years ago and everybody just kept going.
Or maybe the story we’ve inherited about why we do it isn’t entirely accurate.
Because there’s another thing human beings inherit:
History.
And history is complicated because human memory is complicated.
We’ve all heard some version of:
Don’t speak ill of the dead.
I understand the sentiment.
There is something uncomfortable about attacking someone who isn’t here to explain themselves, defend themselves, apologize, clarify, or change.
But I’ve always wondered about the other side of that rule.
If we’re not supposed to speak critically about the dead, who gets to correct the record?
Death has a strange way of softening people’s edges.
Families do it.
Communities do it.
Institutions do it.
Countries do it.
We tell stories about the people who came before us, and over time certain details get emphasized while others become footnotes.
Some people become heroes.
Some become villains.
Some disappear from the story completely.
And eventually we aren’t remembering the person anymore.
We’re remembering the version of them that survived.
That’s important because traditions often depend on those stories.
“We do this because Grandma always did it.”
Okay.
But why did Grandma do it?
Did she love it?
Did she have a choice?
Was it necessary for the world she lived in?
Would she still recommend it in the world we’re living in now?
We don’t always know.
Sometimes we inherit the tradition without inheriting the context.
And after enough generations, questioning the tradition can start to feel like disrespecting the people who passed it down.
But I don’t think questioning something and disrespecting it are the same thing.
In fact, maybe questioning our inheritance is one of our responsibilities.
Because the answer can’t simply be:
Old = bad.
That would be just as intellectually lazy as saying:
Old = good.
We need traditions.
We need inherited knowledge.
We need collective memory.
We need systems that survive individual human beings.
We need shortcuts.
I do not want to wake up tomorrow morning and independently investigate whether language is still serving me.
I have things to do.
I’m going to keep speaking English, sadly it’s the only language I know.
The point isn’t that we should tear down everything that existed before us.
The point is that inheritance and truth aren’t the same thing.
Something being old doesn’t make it wrong.
Something being traditional doesn’t make it right.
Something being passed down doesn’t automatically make it sacred.
And questioning something doesn’t automatically mean it should be discarded.
Maybe every generation has two responsibilities.
Receive the inheritance.
And then:
Audit it.
Keep what still serves us.
Protect what is beautiful.
Build on what works.
Repair what can be repaired.
Question what doesn’t make sense anymore.
And be willing to stop passing along the things that should have ended with us.
Because one day, we’re going to be the dead people.
We’re going to be somebody’s ancestors.
The systems we’re participating in now will become the systems somebody else inherits.
The family traditions we’re creating now may become the things somebody’s great-grandchildren insist on doing because “that’s how our family has always done it.”
Our beliefs will become somebody else’s history.
Our decisions will have consequences that outlive us.
And maybe that’s the part of tradition we don’t think about enough.
We’re not only responsible for deciding what to do with the things that were handed to us.
We’re also deciding what we’re going to hand to the people who come next.
Something to Think About
What are you currently passing down simply because someone passed it down to you?
tianicolespeaks 
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