The Limits We Inherit
The World We Are Born Into
One of the central ideas of Through the Labyrinth is that we are all born inside a labyrinth. We do not come into the world from a neutral position and then freely choose the place from which we will observe it. From the moment we are born, we are embedded in a family, a culture, a country and a particular historical moment. We are educated first at home and later in formal institutions; we are surrounded by particular ideas, traditions and expectations; we have a psychology, a personality and biases that also shape the way we interpret what lies before us. All of this shapes our reality long before we are even sufficiently conscious to question it.
This is why I find the image of a corridor within a labyrinth useful. We are born, so to speak, into one of those corridors. We can spend years moving through it, seeing only the walls immediately around us, without any awareness of the complete structure. Those walls are formed partly by real circumstances, but also by the expectations of our family, our culture, the society in which we live and the historical moment into which we were born. Our reality, which we believe to be reality, is in fact our reality: the part of the labyrinth that we have happened to know.
This has an important consequence. If throughout our lives we have seen only certain corridors, we come to think that no others exist. Some possibilities do not even appear to us as possibilities. Others seem to belong to another kind of person, another age, another family, another culture or simply another kind of life. This can happen without anyone ever explicitly forbidding those possibilities. The world in which we grew up was already preconfigured with certain ideas about what one is supposed to do, when one is supposed to do it and which paths seem reasonable.
This is where a formulation I find particularly useful emerges: many impossibilities are expectations disguised as facts. We may be told that something is strange for our age, that it is too late, that a particular decision is no longer appropriate or that this simply is not the kind of path expected of us. Over time, a family, cultural or social expectation can cease to feel like an opinion or convention and begin to feel like a fact. The walls solidify because we have never seen what lies beyond them.
Age offers a particularly clear example. For decades, research on age norms and the so-called social clock has shown that societies develop expectations about the timing considered appropriate for particular life transitions.¹ Later studies have found that the ages regarded as normal are not fixed and may differ from those recorded in earlier research,² while more recent research also shows that the rigidity of such social timetables can vary across cultures.³ In other words, at least part of what we experience as the “right” or “wrong” time to do something depends upon the social and historical corridor from which we are looking.
But age is only one of the many ways in which this occurs. A family in which several members, across generations, have belonged to a particular profession may transmit, even without saying so explicitly, the expectation that this is the natural path for the next generation. Families linked for decades to politics, law, medicine, business or other professions or activities may do something similar. Education, religion, family background, professional environment, culture or country can gradually delimit a field of possibilities that comes to seem natural precisely because it was already there before we were able to question it. Some people may be brought up to think that certain aspirations lie beyond their reach; others, from entirely different circumstances, may feel that certain choices do not correspond to what is expected of them. The underlying mechanism is similar: something that began as an expectation ends up acquiring the authority of reality.
Beyond the Familiar Corridors
I interpret Theseus, the labyrinth and the Minotaur symbolically. Theseus, like us, was born into his own labyrinth. He too belonged to a world, a history and circumstances that preceded him. What Theseus represents is the attitude of someone who decides to explore the labyrinth beyond the familiar corridors. He does not simply remain within the corridor into which he was born. In pursuit of a mission, he chooses to overcome uncertainty and fear and venture further to explore.
That, for me, is one of the most important dimensions of the metaphor. We are all inside some corridor, but we do not all necessarily develop the same willingness to ask who we might be beyond it. We can spend our entire lives within a set of expectations telling us what we are supposed to do, what is expected of someone of our age, profession, family or environment. Or, at some point, we can become conscious that we are inside a much larger labyrinth and begin to question the limits of what we had until then considered possible.
Of course, this does not mean assuming that every wall is imaginary or can be crossed. Some limitations do exist, and denying them would be naive. Age, the body, geography, money, time and talent can indeed limit or close off real possibilities. We may lack the resources required for a particular activity, we may have an objective physical limitation or we may genuinely have arrived too late for a specific possibility. Recognising this does not weaken the argument; it is an essential part of it. What matters is learning to distinguish these constraints.
Distinguishing the Walls
There is a profound difference between a constraint that actually exists and one we have learned to believe exists. Both can feel exactly the same while we are inside the corridor. We may be standing before a real wall or before an expectation that has become so familiar that it has acquired the appearance of one. If we never make the distinction, both end up governing our decisions in the same way.
This is why I think one of the important questions when facing any limit is where it comes from and what its true nature is. Is there something material that genuinely makes this possibility impossible? Or are we treating as fact something that comes primarily from an expectation or custom? Are we facing a real limit, or an idea that others, with good or bad intentions, passed on to us and that we eventually incorporated as our own?
Sometimes the answer will confirm the constraint. We may examine it carefully and discover that, yes, there really is a wall that we cannot cross. That is part of reality and must be accepted. On other occasions, however, we may discover that the wall was not exactly what we thought it was. Perhaps there was a difficulty, but not an impossibility. Perhaps it was an unusual path, but not a closed one. Perhaps what seemed too late was simply later than our particular social context regarded as normal.
That difference can change a great deal. Our field of possibilities ceases to be defined exclusively by what others, or we ourselves under the influence of others, had taken for granted. Many people probably go further than they initially believed possible precisely because, at some point, they questioned a boundary they had learned to respect. The boundary did not disappear, but they discovered that its reach was smaller than they had assumed.
That requires a certain psychological and intellectual independence: the capacity to depart from consensus when one's own judgement requires it. Thinking for oneself does not mean systematically rejecting the expectations of family, culture or society. Many of them may contain experience, prudence or good reasons. It means not confusing consensus so easily with reality.
Ultimately, that is the attitude I see represented in Theseus. Wisdom lies in becoming sufficiently conscious that our initial corridor is only a minute fraction of a much larger labyrinth, full of possibilities, and that the walls we see from our immediate position do not describe the true limits of the entire structure.
Of course, we will not find every path we want, nor will we be able to cross every limit. But this changes the way we judge the limits we encounter. Before granting them authority over our decisions, we can ask what they really are, where they come from and how far they extend.
Some walls are part of the reality of our human nature. Others belong, to a far greater extent, merely to the corridor we inherited. From the inside, however, both can seem equally solid. Learning to distinguish them is one reason it is worth remembering that we have always been, and will remain, inside a labyrinth.
Notes
Bernice L. Neugarten, Joan W. Moore, and John C. Lowe, “Age Norms, Age Constraints, and Adult Socialization,” American Journal of Sociology 70, no. 6 (1965): 710–17, https://doi.org/10.1086/223965.
Candida C. Peterson, “The Ticking of the Social Clock: Adults’ Beliefs about the Timing of Transition Events,” The International Journal of Aging and Human Development 42, no. 3 (1996): 189–203, https://doi.org/10.2190/MMDD-F9YP-NPN8-720M.
Lu Zang and Heejung Kim, “Culture and the Social Clock: Cultural Differences in the Optimal Timing of Life,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 52, no. 10 (2026): 3144–63, https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672251362514.