Choose The Shoes You Walk In

On Superman, Seneca and picking your parentage

Jul 25, 2025

We like to believe our lives have a shape, that we are meant for something special, and there is a reason we’re here. This belief, when it takes hold early, can guide a person through hardship and life’s trials with remarkable steadiness. The idea that you’re the protagonist of a meaningful story — not just a background character who endures life as it happens to them — is powerful. It provides an anchor when the world tilts.

But what if it’s a lie?

Spoilers ahead for Superman.

In the new Superman film, director James Gunn offers a variation on the well-worn origin of Kal-El (Clark Kent…Superman). In this version, Superman is sent to Earth by his Kryptonian parents not to protect it, but to dominate it. The heroic narrative Clark had been living out was based on a mere fragment of a video message from his birth parents. Superman is raised by the Kents, not knowing the dark truth of why he was really sent to Earth.

When the full message is recovered and played back for the world by Lex Luthor, it ignites a full-blown crisis of identity for Superman.

Other fictional heroes have faced the same rupture of self. Dragon Ball Z’s Goku learns he was meant to destroy Earth as a member of the Saiyan race. Rey finds out she is a Palpatine in Star Wars IX, shattering her sense of self as a virtuous nobody with a blank slate.

Of course, both characters reject the stories written for them and write new ones.

Seneca, the Roman Stoic, had something to say about this.

“We are in the habit of saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents who were allotted to us... But we can choose whose children we would like to be.”

Rey travels to Tatooine to the homestead where Luke Skywalker grew up and buries the lightsabers of Luke and his sister, Leia. When an old woman approaches Rey in the desert and asks Rey to identify herself, she does something that is still, to this day, rather controversial.

“I’m Rey….Rey Skywalker.”

Something that can’t be ignored about the Star Wars story is that the Skywalker line is beloved by fans of the saga, and the same was never really true for the character of Rey.

What gives her the right to take the Skywalker name?

The answer is: nothing. There is only a choice. The Skywalkers are all gone at this point in the story, and their legacy is a turning point where it can begin the slow fade from myth to obscurity. Luke trained Rey, he invested in her as a pupil and in many ways owed her for the belief she had in him during a low point in his own journey.

Very similar to how Rose DeWitt Bukater takes on the surname of Jack Dawson at the end of Titanic, Rey chooses a household of the noblest intellect and keeps that flame alive. Clark Kent in this iteration of Superman basically does the same.

So should you.

You don’t have to go to the courthouse and apply for a name change. You can start walking in the shoes of the person you most admire right now, without permission or approval. The legacy of great minds and virtuous heroes is not a legal name on a piece of paper, but being invoked in a positive way long after they’re gone.

There are households of the noblest intellects: choose the one into which you wish to be adopted, and you will inherit not only their name but their property too. Nor will this property need to be guarded meanly or grudgingly: the more it is shared out, the greater it will become.”

It all feels like playing dress up. Like it’s fake, and we know it.

C.S. Lewis said that when a Christian performs the Lord’s Prayer and says “Our Father”, they are putting themselves in the place of a child of God.

“You are dressing up as Christ. If you like, you are pretending.”

You do this because, “Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.”

One wonders if that’s how Luke Skywalker thought of declaring himself a Jedi at the conclusion of Return of the Jedi when facing down Emperor Palpatine. No one knighted him, and Master Yoda didn’t declare Luke’s training complete before he died.

No. It was on Luke, and it’s on you, to at some point claim the name you wish to live in accordance with.

“I am a Jedi, like my father before me.”

Even Luke looked somewhat surprised as the words flowed from his lips. We’re all waiting for someone else to declare our growth complete and the journey of self-improvement done, but it’s never over.

It’s a very long and drawn-out game of dress up that one day starts to feel real.

And if your focus truly determines your reality, which we believe it does, one day it will all become real. Choose the household of the noblest intellect and join.