I realise that a 'shaped reality is subjective', but as far as I can see that is what we are left with individually, to work with, for better or worse. You speak about conditioning, and aspirations and this leads me to think that we are back to the conundrum of free will. This all depends how you view it, whether it is viewed as human beings being lead by external causes or making choices as individual actors. The key aspect is reaction vs action. It is complicated, in terms of the focus. One thing which I wonder about is whether we can create free will, or gravitate towards it, through greater consciousness or awareness. What I am trying to say is that rather than just being robots of conditioning, perhaps through greater understanding and insight we are able to attain greater levels of freedom of choice — Jack Cummins

Is there a question in the above?

This is connected to learning to become human. — Jack Cummins

Is this what we are, or all that we are – some(thing) with the potential "to become human"? My online musings are ... inconclusive, and not very encouraging:

You are atoms & void (what) configured as an emergent, ecology-constrained, complex system (how). — 180 Proof

Life is food playing with its food ...

... (if, by life, what is meant is, in part, 'ecology-bound agent-systems maintained and self-replicated via metabolising, while being metabolized by, other ecology-bound agent-systems'). — 180 Proof

I don't know what to think other than that we are not what we think we are – the human species (may be the only species that) deludes itself about itself in order to flatter itself (for the sake of anxiety / terror management? (Becker)) and maybe, possibly, in order to know anything is necessarily incapable of knowing itself (pace Pythia, etc) ... just as eyes see by not seeing themselves seeing. — 180 Proof

There's nothing "absurd" about humans being mistaken about what seems like "first person experience" that's, in fact, merely an illusionary artifact (i.e. a verb mistaken as a noun) of an ecology-situated, strange looping, reflexive information processing system. — 180 Proof

[1] remove a hemisphere, [2] replace it with a nanoengineered self-assembling "recording" medium that's connected to the remaining organic hemisphere by the corpus callosum, then [3] postmortem remove the expired (preferably euthanised) organic cadaver and [4] either (A) connect the synthetic hemi-brain via BMI to a teleoperational synthetic drone and/or (B) implant the synthetic hemi-brain directly into a synthetic body (humanoid replica). — 180 Proof

And yet our sisyphusean challenge will remain: "to become human" ...

Natality (kinship) providing the seeds of love, friendship (co-solitudes) is the highest form of love, as I understand it, and solidarity (just community, deep ecology) is the highest form of friendship. — 180 Proof

I like your sets of reflections, and I find the one which stands out is 'we are not what we think we are.' It seems likely that human beings probably develop interpretations of themselves and humans in general, some which deflate and some which inflate themselves. A lot of the thoughts which we have may be wrong, or, at least, only very partially true.