Your life contains consequences from choices made before you were born.

The shape of your life was partly set before you arrived. Where your family ended up, what they could afford, what they believed, which opportunities existed near you. None of it was chosen by you and all of it has been quietly setting your starting conditions.

Seeing that clearly is useful in two directions. It softens the harshness you might direct at yourself for not having overcome everything, and it does the same for how you judge other people’s positions. It also makes your own choices feel weightier, since they are going to be somebody’s inherited conditions later.