I did not choose my parents. I did not choose my place of birth. I did not choose the high school I attended. I have a good job. Fate, luck, or randomness by whatever name you want to call it, has been pretty good to me. I am better off than most people on this planet.
And you? Are you doing well (or poorly) in life inspite of it or because of it?
Which has the greater influence on the outcome of your life, random events or choices you make?
I did not choose my parents. I did not choose my place of birth.
I did, however, choose to attend and finish college. I chose to get married, to have children, and to get divorced. I chose my career, and have done well in it through my own impetus. I chose to start my business. I chose the path I’ve taken in life, accounting for what was thrown at me.
I feel that I’ve chosen well. I like my life. I’m happy with who I am and what I have accomplished. I’m not finished either :D. More choices to come. Sometimes I will screw them up and sometimes I will not. I do believe that I will always land on my feet, one way or another.
I am doing well in life. A major factor is that I was born in the US.
I come from a depressed region (WV) and my family was lower-middle class (my father was an immigrant), but there were opportunities for education and employment, which I partook of.
I feel very lucky.
I worked hard – I paid my way through school with no loans – but I fully acknowledge that there are people who worked even harder but didn’t do as well as me.
I also acknowledge that there are people who had similar opportunities and didn’t take advantage of them.
Fate provides us with choices. How we address them, or whether we recognize them is subordinate to this fact. We breathe the air that is blown to us.
Put me in the Fate camp.
Choice.
My Grandparents chose to value education, and so my parents were well educated, and became teachers instead of labourers. They also didn’t feel constrained to live in the same areas of UK that my Grand Parents came from. My parents workde hard so they became richer than my Granparents had ever been. This allowed them to instill within me and my brother the importance of education. My Brother and me were well educated, he moved into computing in the early 80’s I being much younger went in University in the early 90’s. We neither felt confined to one country, and both settled in USA for different reasons. Now my Brother is making enough money that his children can go to study less echonomically secure subjects in the knowledge of continued financial safety.
All choices, and very little sign of fate.
F.U. Shakespeare and Cowgirl, from your responses, Can I take it that you feel choice is the greater influence?
I do feel that I have some control over my life. If pressed for a percentage though I would save 70% of why I am where I am was out of my control. There are so many factors belonging to chance. I’m healthy. I can’t even begin to imagine the differing paths my life would have taken if I hadn’t received good health through genetics.
I’m not trying to sway your opinion. I specifically didn’t want this to be a debate but a poll about which had the greater effect.
I find it hard to say that fate is a much bigger factor than choice when you consider that the fact that you even exist at all is completely determined by fate. After we get past the extrordinary odds that the solar system formed in a way to support life, and then humans evolved, and then the one in several million shot that it took for that particular sperm to join that egg for each of your ancestors. After that, figure the chances that you were born into a developed country rather than say, Cambodia or the Sudan. After that, your looks and your intelligence were heavily influenced by your genetics. The fact that you do or do not have a chronic or fatal genetic disease comes largely from that too. You also don’t have complete control over how other people such as your spouse or your boss can throw your life out of control suddenly. After all that, I suppose that you might have some “free will” in how your life will go.
Sorry. my post should read that fate is a much bigger factor than choice.
I’m clearly divided – I think both fate and choice played a part in my life.
And here I’m using ‘choice’ to refer to choices that I made – my ancestors (and others before me) made choices, but by the time I came along, the results were part of my fate.
If pressed, I guess I would say that fate played a bigger part in my getting here than work.
But I feel like at this point, I’m in control of my life, and thus responsible if I screw it up.
Does this answer the poll?
You may take it that way on my part, although I do recognize that many, many things out of my control have also contributed to who I am today. That includes choices made by my ancestors about where to live and what to do, and some tremendous leaps of faith on their parts.
But all it would have taken for my life to be completely different would be choosing different things at key times. I don’t know if that would be worse or better.
I didn’t choose the things that can be chosen: parents, birthplace, where I grew up, where I went to school.
I also didn’t choose some of the more Life Changing Events [Sup]TM[/Sup] that happened (divorce, unemployment).
However, I did choose how to react to those things, which is why I think I’ve been able to create a much more successful life than the one I was having, and see it improving even more over the next year.
For a long time, I felt like I had the worst life in the world, and the list of things that I would change if I had a choice (parents, etc.) was a long one. Now I know that I wouldn’t change a thing, because everything I’ve been through has helped me to be who I am today, and while far from perfect, I can’t imagine wanting to be much different.
OK, maybe thinner. I’m working on that.
I’d say choice, by 80% or so if I had to give a percentage.
Choice for me, too. Given the odds, I would have a very different life if left to fate.
I’m not proud of some of my choices in the past, but at the time they seemed right. I AM proud of who I am now.
I’d have to agree with psycat90. “Fate” (or circumstance) has intervened, big time, but the negative interventions I’ve dealt with and the positive interventions I’ve been able to take advantage of because I put myself in their way.
No silver spoons or sob stories here.
But then, couldn’t you say that your parents were more or less “fated” to be well educated, because of your grandparents’ attitude (which might be chosen by free will, or might have more to do with how their parents raised them). They might not have turned out so well if they had been born to different parents, and whichever family you wind up in is wholly a matter of fate.
I’d say fate, for the same reasons Shagnasty posted. Even the people who did work up from nothing were fated to do so because of their high intelligence and ambition, and I believe those things are related more to brain chemistry than “free will.” Then again I’m not all that convinced true free will exists.
Well, I can tell that my choosing is influenced heavily by my parents, which makes it impossible to disentangle. My life is roughly summarized by “school, university, job” which was pretty straight through. With less generosity from my parents I’d likely have different attitudes to money, etc, but I think I’d have ended up in roughly the same place. OTOH, if I had gone to a different school, I may well not have managed to get to the same uni, which would have been very different.
I could agree with you if fate was synonymous with chance. Surely chance is dominant since the chance of you ever existing is infinitessimal considering the number of possible dna combinations you could have been. But chance once it becomes a past event is no longer random. The chance that you might exist was low, bur the probability that you now exist is 1. All that is left to look at in historic data is the choices made. We can’t determine if the choices were free will or just
probabalisitc chance effects but we commonly can identify choices from non-choices.
I was the kid who had to learn everything the hard way. Unfortunately, my kid is the same way. I had every opportunity to have a life much less fucked up than mine has been. However, I’ve learned (mostly by looking in the mirror) that most of the shit in a life is brought on by stupid choices, and I try really hard not to make them anymore.
There is definitely a degree of fate in everyone’s life. My father was born to poor, uneducated, often bigoted people and grew up to be the finest example of a Good Human Being I can think of.
Of course, we can’t control every detail of our lives, but I’m convinced most of us have control over most of the Big Decisions we make in a lifetime. Sometimes it takes experience and maturity to realize that. And sometimes it takes some people longer than others to grow up.
(Rainman hat on) Choice…definitely choice.(/Rainman hat)
Conbination. Certain choices I’ve made were instrumental in getting where I am, but it was chance events that put me there.
For instance: making friends with a science fiction writer at Lunacon in 1984. An agent invited him to dinner, and he invited me. The agent asked to see my novel, and chose to represent me.
Or my editor being a sucker for barroom scenes and my novel starting off with one.
Being given a free account on GEnie and, when trying it out at a temp assignment (I didn’t even have a modem then), hearing about an anthology there that was perfect for a story I had already written.
Getting fired three weeks before a job was advertised that fit me perfectly (and where I’m working now).
Now, obviously, if I hadn’t made the choice to persue being a science fiction writer, these never would have happened. OTOH, if it weren’t for chance, they never would have happened, either.
You need a combination of both (this is, BTW, the actual message of Horatio Alger books – that by hard work you can be put in the position to take advantage of your chance when it comes along). One of the biggest errors people make is assume it is one or the other.
You know the saying that it’s better to be lucky than good? I exemplify that. I’ve been very fortunate. I don’t deserve what I have.