That's a bit simplistic. Certainly there are people who defeated and bitter due to shallowness and lack of imagination vs those with the will and wisdom to pursue their objectives effectively. But it seems to me that you're identifying a philosophical dichotomy within your professional class.
But besides the philosophical divide, people are sorted by circumstantial conditions, depending on what good/bad luck they've had, decisions they've made, and economic situations they've experienced. Life might force people to choose between supporting their family and pursuing their dreams, or their dreams might depend on capital or social resources that they have no idea how to acquire, or they might be saddled with some burdensome health condition.
It's not simply a matter of having failed to make a necessary psychological adjustment to take charge of one's own life. There are lots of people out there that are fully aware of their situation and poorly positioned to do anything about it.
Yes, luck plays a big part of it, so it's important to redefine your perspective so you don't value dominance over others or class or such things, because that can be a lost cause. You were given a hand of card at random, and while there is some wiggle room in terms of how far you can make it given the cards you were given, a bad hand is still a bad hand, and can only let you do so much.
Focus on your personal growth, but understand your circumstances and where you start from, and recognize how much you managed to optimize and accomplish relative to that.
And in my opinion, there's no place for hard work within this framework. The feeling of hardship is your body telling you your circumstances ain't cut out for this thing. You also have the ability to reason, so you can reason that some hard things are worth pushing through the pain, like say for a life saving surgery. But sometimes I think people reason that they will be able to push through something, yet fail consistently to be motivated to do so. That's when you need to realize, hold on, ok, this ain't gonna work for me, I need to find something else that's easier. And no, the people who made it where you failed didn't do so because they just pushed through that same hardship, generally it just wasn't as hard for them to find the motivation to push through.
I think a lot of people are emotionally unable to deal with a world that is as dramatically unfair as ours is, so they fall back to the childish notion that people who have fallen on hard times deserve it and successful people controlled their own destiny to get there, because the alternative is too uncomfortable to think about.
You seem to be saying that people are simply a product of their (random) environment. I think that too is oversimplifying the problem. How can we tell the "clever guys on hard times" from those destined to wallow at the bottom? Just saying that the everyone that doesn't succeed in life was "destined to be a low income worker" reeks of confirmation bias.
Except that plenty of people never find a job they like. They're stuck working at Burger King or some menial office admin job, and they hate it. They are, in general, not hanging out on HN or blogging about their amazing experiences wheeling and dealing their MBA cred. Hence the bias.
And, in anticipation of the standard reply on this, we cannot assume such people don't also have MBAs or PhDs in Social sciences. The cards just don't fall right every time. To paraphrase another HN discussionf from a few days back, a series of fortunate accidents allow certain people to become wildly (or at least comfortably) successful. The same chain of accidents, playing out differently for others, draw them in the other direction.
If there is a second, standard reply to this idea, it usually has to do with inherited ability (or innate talent) versus disease. So we should also explicitly not assume the people I'm describing have any such disabilities. Those would be additional forces, but plently of able, coherent people never nail a full-on life-hack, in the long-term.
Its relatively punishing also to be poor and follow your passion. Then the opposing end is also punishing to be I've heard. And then some where in the middle there are people who envy with either end of spectrum and they think they would be happy with the end they see while telling them self that they cannot be happy before getting the benefits of being at the point in the spectrum they envy, while not realizing that they are in a nice point in the spectrum of trade offs. People want what they don't have and ignore the trade offs the others had to pay for it.
You can't see the luck in having a life experience that motivated you to become financially successful? I mean, I know financially successful people and they go around judging poor and middle class people for their bad financial decisions, and I'm just thinking--well, maybe they did not have the education to help them do that, or they did not have a life experience that woke them up, because it is actually possible to be perfectly content with being poor/middle class or for it to never occur to themselves to question their circumstances?
Already, we can make an example of you--you can't think beyond your own circumstances, and you think that just because you made a choice to better your life and succeeded in it, then people whom you don't deem successful must simply be choosing to not make the choices that you did. I'm sorry, but even if you come from a painful background, that doesn't give you a pass to say that your path to get where you are is supposed to be the same for everyone.
This statement surprises me. I'll admit to being a little bit unstable perhaps, but when I look at people I know who have succeeded and don't need to work anymore, I struggle a lot with feelings of anger and rage.
The "story" we're told is: work hard and you will succeed. But these successful people aren't working. They're just rich. Isn't that the whole idea? Passive income?
But then I look and see, my labor is supporting their passive income. That makes me angry. Not out of some altruistic desire for equality, but out of jealousy. Why can't I be the one with the passive income?
Class structure has only a little to do with absolutes and a lot to do with relative comparisons. You could tell me that, worldwide, I'm the 1%. I have a place to sleep (heated), food to eat (cooked), and the safety of a policed city. Boom, that's more than most of the world will ever dream. But does that help? No, it doesn't. Because we always compare upwards. It's miserable. I'm miserable every day. I'm angry, I'm rageful, I'm scared. I'm a broken person.
I try to fix these things by focusing on amazingly lucky and well off I actually am in the global scheme, by focusing on how my Maslow needs actually are being met, by focusing on pride in my work and professional accomplishments, and by ignoring both the horrors below me in the world and the lavish luxury above me. But can I understand how someone could lash out, could become violent, at such perceived injustice? Absolutely I understand!
The contrast between the article and the comments here is absolutely striking. And it all comes down to attitude.
Some people look at life and see the opportunities. Others look and see the obstacles. Some take the hardship they encounter and use it to grow. Others use it as an excuse for their failures.
The older I get, the more people I know, the more I arrive to the conclusion that it’s all about attitude, more than anything else.
It’s our attitude that decides if we end up as winners or losers. It’s our own responsibility and merit, not others'. But pushing a victim mentality, a loser attitude on others - is criminal.
My experience is that the opposite is often true: quite a number of those who overcame <x> tend to have the least sympathy for people struggling with <x>.
I've met ex-poor people who attribute their success to simple 'trying harder' than other poor people. I've met socially successful people who attribute it to learning 'a few simple tricks' and 'getting out of the comfort zone'. I've met ex-depressed people proclaim that if only others would meditate and/or believe in themselves it would solve all their negative feelings. I've met gays who argued that if only these sexually-confused individuals would let themselves be themselves, and move somewhere more free if need be, their struggle would be over. I've met Christians who attribute their new-found wholesomeness to simple being more repentant than everyone else in church.
In each of these cases, the conclusion was that 'these people', whether poor, socially anxious, depressed, gay or in existential crises, are just not trying hard enough (lazy).
In fact, I'd go as far as claiming that, considering myself someone who has had a decent breadth and depth of experience with these groups, easily more than 50% of the ex-somethings I've met are more on the side of judging their ex-peers instead of supporting them.
I'm sure there's fascinating research in this area. I catch myself doing similar things and while I have some theories I can't fully explain why I do it. Protecting/polishing my ego? Keeping some clean narrative and sense of progression in my head?
There is always someone with something, for example talent or opportunity, that you don’t have or can’t have. I guess I was lucky to come to terms with “life’s no fair” at a young age.
That doesn’t mean I’m defeatist, I’m a very driven person, but it does allow me to be more realistic without becoming demotivated.
I have met a lot of well-intentioned folks who are blind to the roles of chance and circumstance in their own lives because they correctly perceive that they've had to work very hard to get where they are. And though I don't agree, I can at least understand the appeal in just assuming that anyone who's less successful is just not trying hard enough.
Yes, we seem to disagree about whether there exists a category of people who a) work hard and b) are not "successful" and, if so, are even relevant to the discussion.
This world-view may boil down to left vs. right, or populist vs. libertarianist, or what have you, but to claim to know why you saw so many downvotes seems a bit presumptuous when there might be plenty of other explanations.
For all I know, people were turned-away by a perceived arrogance in your opening statement, which has less to do with politics and more to do with tact.
I think I did. That person was dealt bad cards (assuming they are sufficiently motivated and getting the most out of their set of circumstances), and their mission in life now is to overcome whatever challenges are currently preventing them from having a higher paying job (of which there are plenty).
Some are born with goals, some find their own goals, and some have goals thrust upon them.
Being a smart kid can be hard. Parents, teachers and peers see that mythical attribute "potential" and push you in directions to reach it.
Get A's in school? Gotta be a doctor or lawyer. (OK, that ages me, today they'd be pushing for programmer.)
Graduating college with a degree you never wanted must be depressing for the person who sees it as a work-prison and a life sentence. Better to fail, to drop out, to disappointed all, to get a chance to start over.
The very lucky few, and I count myself among them, have both potential and the freedom to find their own path - the thing that provides pleasure - where people pay you to do what you love. And adults around you who accept that, even if it's not a high-prestige occupation. (Programming in the 80s wasn't the career choice it is today.)
Ivy league students don't get there by themselves. A life-time of adults help you, pay for you, drive you around, push you. To those whom much is given, much is expected. And the weight of expectation can sit very heavy.
I see people from similar backgrounds achieving very different outcomes in life. Myself, I come from a poor rural area that many people of my peer group did not escape. I'm proud of my life today, though it is not perfect. I can say it was damned hard to get here and I am happy to be here.
What role did agency play in separating my more successful peers from the ones at home in their parents' trailers with no meaningful occupation, often accompanied by unplanned children and drug problems? I think it is greater than 0%.
I honestly believe that you have to be born into privilege to believe something like "You are the least important factor in your success". I cannot believe it after seeing what I have seen.
Moreover, when privileged people tell the world that success is all luck, I fear that it has a poisonous cultural effect. You are telling all the would-be strivers in the world "Give up. You lost the lottery at birth. What will happen will happen". I tell them "Fight harder! You'll make it! Keep trying!". Yes, the reality is that some of them will never make it. But if they fail, they'll fail with dignity and self-respect. That's worth something.
What a great and thoughtful response. I really believe too many people — some very ambitious and successful — are being driven by unexamined pathology. I've seen too many examples of people who achieve their goals in terms of money or career or prestige or knowledge and remain miserable because they never took the time to ask themselves these questions.
The article makes a good point but if a person is already in the 'compare' mindset it is often impossible for them to internalize it. One of the oddest things is finding a fact that you don't believe because if you did, it would require you to change your whole belief structure about yourself.
The canonical example is addiction, addicts believe they can quit any time, because if they couldn't quit then they would have to admit they were an addict. And generally admitting that means admitting you aren't in control and that is a scary place to be without any support.
In startups you will often see this if the company is suddenly very successful and people are suddenly "rich" (by their own definition). I've seen two responses to that outcome, sometimes people are grateful that they were lucky to be in the right place at the right time, and some people develop this internal view that they are somehow "better" than the folks who did not get rich. In the latter case it expresses very oddly, putting down people who are doing better work than they are, but aren't rich. The challenge of admitting that they were just lucky, means they have to understand they are not somehow better than the people who didn't get rich.
At least if you won the lottery its obvious you were just lucky.
We probably just have different viewpoints, and the "fuzzy edges" may be areas we don't agree. I am very aware of what my views are, whereas you imply I may be unaware. I find it useful to not waste too much time worrying about challenges and instead focus on solutions and opportunity. This has allowed me to come from childhood poverty into an adulthood that successfully provides me the life I want, without hangups or emotional baggage. If other people find success through different strategies, that's great. But as I said, I can't help but think that many people are only holding themselves back by focusing on things that are out of their control
But besides the philosophical divide, people are sorted by circumstantial conditions, depending on what good/bad luck they've had, decisions they've made, and economic situations they've experienced. Life might force people to choose between supporting their family and pursuing their dreams, or their dreams might depend on capital or social resources that they have no idea how to acquire, or they might be saddled with some burdensome health condition.
It's not simply a matter of having failed to make a necessary psychological adjustment to take charge of one's own life. There are lots of people out there that are fully aware of their situation and poorly positioned to do anything about it.
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