We have choices - and I think it’s probably true we generally don’t make the right choices often enough (even when the outcome is predictable).
But also, shit happens that we have no choice about (unless you want to argue that there is a still the choice to accept it, but often, accepting shit is functionally the same as rejecting it - it’s still shit)
You’re either a “victim” or you’re not.
With the exception of true exploitation, no one interferes in your life without your consent. You always have the option to ignore them and follow your own path.
It’s about owning your choices. You don’t have to like all your choices, in fact you can regret them, recognize them as errors, etc. But you still have to own them.
When you rationalize your choices away, as being ‘forced’ by another’s actions or responses, you are doing yourself a very, very harmful disservice. You are deluding yourself, and ignoring what you know, deep down to be the truth. You didn’t have to swing at that guy, you didn’t have to say that hurtful thing, you didn’t have to look the other way, or keep quiet. All choices.
Once you begin to delude yourself, you will continue, no stops at just one. Pretty soon you’ve bent yourself into not being able to see reality, as it is anymore and there is very little hope for your future. I think we all know someone like this. It’s pointless to even talk to them about anything, they literally cannot hear.
It’s a hard reality, but in the end, you are not your intentions, you are your actions. Right or wrong, if you’re willing to take ownership of them, especially the missteps, you’ll probably turn into a gem of a person, in my experience.
Siri?
The only things you can control are your attitude and your reactions.
Our mistakes are generally the result of poor choices – but sometimes we make the best choices we can based on limited or incorrect information. The beautiful thing about taking responsibility for our choices and owning up to our mistakes in life is that, quite often, we get a second chance. There are very few choices in your life that are irrevocable and that will ruin your entire life forever. Some choices really fuck things up and it’s very difficult to “fix” your mistakes, but for the most part, when you own up to your shit, you are able to have some influence over the outcome, if not outright control. Control is mostly an illusion though, so be careful with that.
Not mocking you, but I am mocking the dozen or so people on this message board that believe what I wrote.
The problem with this question is that is has very significant political consequences. Once we establish that fate is in control our actions have no consequences. So a person that is poor had bad luck, it’s not their fault. Likewise, a person that is rich is undeserving. Since it all comes down to luck it’s not fair that some people are rich and some people are poor.
The only fair and just thing to do is have the government play karmic overlord. Take money from the rich and give it to the poor. Now everyone is the same as it should be.
If, on the other hand, there is even a shred of personal responsibility that policy quickly turns into a reward for poor choices and a punishment for good. Someone that was born into a good family that decides to work hard and get a medical degree find herself subsidizing the life of a person also born into a good family that opted for an over priced liberal arts degree.
I was part of a scholarship selection committee years ago and had the opportunity to watch the students progress. Each of them could be considered “lucky” enough to get a full ride. Some of them took that opportunity and made the most of it. Others drank them sells onto academic probation.
It’s the first step for many here. As I said, if we assume that our life is the result of the choices we make it’s a lot harder to justify wealth redistribution.
Not when we see it as our responsibility to those less fortunate. Which is, wait for it…a choice.
I have a friend who was a bright, energetic, and hard working engineer. At 35 he came down with bone cancer. After 10 years of treatment he’s still alive, but he’s mentally and physically exhausted after two or three hours of work. His immune system is destroyed after multiple rounds of chemo and radiation, and he gets opportunistic infections constantly. He is incapable of holding down a full time job, and is pretty much permanently disabled.
This is clearly his fault, and he should have been tossed out in the gutter to die by any fair-minded society.
We all have choices. We don’t all have *all *of the choices we’d like to have. Some of our choices are between equally or nearly equally terrible options, like do we decline the chemo and probably die in 3 months, or take the chemo and probably die in 6 months, but be sick from the chemo the whole time?
Even if someone has a gun to your head, you have a choice. You can choose to die rather than submit to what he wants you to do. It’s not an easy choice. It’s not a choice we want to make, but it’s still a choice.
(That being said, I still have no freaking clue what this thread is actually about.)
Not sure just what the OP is on about, but it presents a false dichotomy.
I’m responsible for making my kids, for marrying their mother, for joining the Army, for my shitty grades my first two years in college and my fabulous ones the last two years. I’m not responsible for being born in the USA to a couple of people who wanted to live in a house rather than a trailer. All of that has made me who I am, but it’s not all been my choice.
Now that’s out of the way: preachy time! Learn to tell the difference between what you can control (attitude & reaction) and what you can’t (someone else’s attitude & reaction), and own your failures and triumphs equally. You are the composite of what you have done, right and wrong, and to deny any of it is to intentionally misinterpret yourself and your abilities. Once you start lying to yourself you begin to lose yourself, and that way lies madness. And spontaneous orgies.
While some well to do people become poor, and some poor people become rich, that is not the way to bet. Do you think the person who inherited money and can live on it is better than a poor person? Do you think a child who is born to a drunk mother and suffers from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome deserves it?
Bill Gates made a ton of money, and deserves it, but don’t you think he was helped a lot by having a wealthy father and thus a safety net?
Unless you have some way of proving that every person who needs help is that way because of poor choices, it is not hard at all.
The one thing you can do to help with this is to think about plan B. If you never make a mistake you are not trying hard enough. However you can plan to minimize the effect of things going south.
That’s why it is important to let kids make mistakes. If they never learn that things can go wrong, they never learn to plan for them to go wrong.
A great deal of what we consider conscious choice is a rationalisation of our compulsive actions fabricated after the event.
We are all predetermined to live under the illusion of free-will.