A little of both, I guess.
Fate: Born in this time, this place, (reasonably) healthy.
Choice: Deciding to try a lot of stuff (IMO Lady Luck is much better at hitting a moving target).
Even after we get over the fact that I was lucky to born where I was, fate still had a bigger influence in my life than choice. When I was about to graduate from high school and needed some help finding a college, my mother called her good friend, one of our state senators, and he said that he just happened to have a full scholarship to Tulane University that he needed “to get rid of”. It was mine that instant and I went. The first month of my freshman year, I left my dorm room unlocked accidentally. I woke up with my future wife (who I had never met before) on the foot of my bed because she was drunk as a skunk and had heard that I was a cool guy.
My work study position to pay for spending money was as an assistant in the Psychology department. I met one of the professors in neuroscience and asked to be an intern in his lab. He took me and hooked me up with one of his friends at Dartmouth to get me into graduate school. We didn’t get along at all so I moved to Boston.
I was desperate for as job and I was at a cocktail party one night and I met a CEO. He told me that he could help me get a job. Three months later, I had a job that I loved with his company.
It goes on and on, but basically anything that I can name that happened to me as an adult is part of a convoluted story that I could not have planned nor ever imagined before that.
The answer is, of course, both. The older we get, the LESS is decided by “fate,” since we choose what to do about the luck of what we can’t control. Lots of people are born in deprived, impoverished surroundings. Some become wonderful people, an asset to themselves and society. Some don’t. A few are born into a life of luxury. Some of those become giving, charitable and kind, using their weath and other gifts for the benefit of others; some don’t. Sometimes you see both kinds in the same family.
An interesting twist on this is the old debate about “nature vs. nurture” in child development. We are used to parents (particularly mothers) in the old days being blamed for everything that was “wrong” with a person. A good read on this is The NURTURE ASSUMPTION: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do by Judith Harris.
I was born to upper-middle class, highly intelligent parents and was put through the best schools.
Now I am a waitress struggling to get by. My life was entirely my choice. I chose to take it the ‘hard’ way. The status of my life as in social-economic status is entirely by choice. The status of my life as in “the life I want to live” has also been entirely by choice. I have been incredibly lucky, but I feel that I make my own luck.
I give choice 90%. Fate, the 10%, being solely composed of health.
I count myself lucky to have been born with some abilities and intelligence, in a time and place where I am free to use them. Had I existed 200 years ago I would have been consigned to a much more restricted range of possiblities.
I have been unlucky in some areas, too, like the lack of native ability in other areas, and some health issues. However, in other times and places these issues might not have mattered, because I might well have been dead by now.
With all that, like ava, a lot of the good fortune has been good (and conscious) choices – I sacrificed temporary things for an education. I postponed childbearing until we were financially secure enough that I could stay at home. I made other career and life choices that turned out well for the most part. The mistakes I’ve made have for the most part so far not been devastating.
I have a friend also born with lots of abilities and intelligence. She made two or three errors in judgement – primarily the men she chose to share her life with – that have made a universe of difference.
About equal I’d say. I was rather immature through high school, maybe because I was jumped ahead in elementary school. Thus I was put into a class with children almost a year older and that’s a big difference at age 5 or 6, so I always was a little behind all through elementary and high schools and didn’t do too well.
I was working as a janitor, ticket taker, and understudy projectionist at a local movie theater when WWII came along and the projectionist got a job in Cedar Rapids with Collins Radio. I inherited the job from him. Pure chance.
Then one day I ran into a high school classmate who said he had just enlisted in the Army as an Aviation Cadet. He and I were both airplane nuts and had built model planes together in school. I asked how he managed that and he said that the local American Legion was conducting a series of classes to help people who wanted to prepare to take the Cadet exam. So I contacted the guy running the classes and signed up. (Combined chance and choice). I took the Cadet exam in Des Moines and passed it on 22 Sept, 1942 thus enlisting in the Army.
Undergoing the Cadet training and sucessfully making it through when a lot of others didn’t increased my maturity and confidence considerably. Part of the Cadet training was 3 months of college training and I realized as a result of that that I was better at school than I thought.
That encouraged me to use the GI bill to go to Engineering College at the University of Iowa.
And, of course, surviving WWII was a matter of pure luck although the probabilities are on your side. A bunch of identical airplanes with crews all trained alike and flying in a prescribe formation get shot at. Which ones, if any, get hit and who in them gets hit is pure chance. It’s highly probable that the flak gunner wasn’t even aiming at the plane that is hit and for certain wasn’t aiming at an individual within that plane.
So, all in all, my status results from both chance and choice and I suspect that’s the case with most people.
Being in the right place at the right time is crucial, but you also have to recognize that it is the right place and time and act on it.
100 % choice here.
Until college, I would say I was mostly reacting to circumstances, certainly not controlling them. Then college came with the excruciating pressure of the Draft. Finally couldn’t take it any more. Decided I would determine when I went in, not some faceless geezers in the draft board. **I ** would decide get a commission. I would decide when to go to the Big Country. (3 stupidest things I ever did in my life), but all done to maintain the illusion of freedom. No matter what happened, I put my sorry ass there. (I could have gone to Canada, eh).
Been following that philosophy ever since. However, the decision making process has improved considerably.
30 years of working. Quit several jobs, fired a couple of times. Employment opportunities may have been limited by job skills and economic conditions, but what you do for a living does not define who you are as a person.
Quit for good now, made my pile and now just waiting for Social Security to kick in.
If that ain’t free will, don’t know what is. Stuff that in your pipe and smoke it Mr. Calvin
I think that if we label it fate that someone would be hard-working, this discussion isn’t very interesting.
That said, I think that everyone’s situation is a combination of both choice and luck. No matter how competent or hard working, the lucky circumstance of being born in the US has already lofted many to about the 90th percentile, meaning: somewhat decent education, no polio (or smallpox or etc.), comparatively little civil strife, and living in a good approximation of a meritocracy. Sure, I worked hard and blah-de-blah blah blah, but I got a pretty good education from public schools, had AFDC at some crucial times in my childhood, had a teacher in H.S. who went out of his way to reverse my low self-esteem (and subsequently suggest that maybe I should aim really high when choosing a college), and benefited from Pell Grants, student loans and Ronald Reagan’s method of bankrupting the USSR (resulting in an aerospace hiring boom just as I entered the job market). Those circumstances could have gone the other way; just witness the job market for tech grads in the last couple of years. I take credit for the things I’ve worked for, but I have to acknowledge that fate presented me with a good share of opportunities.
My situation in life has been very much decided by fate. I haven’t gone “job hunting” since I was in my teens – every major job throughout my career has just happened to fall into my lap.
I didn’t pursue any kind of relationship with the woman who would eventually become my wife, because A) she was a close friend’s sister, and b) she was waaaaay out of my league. But apparently she was completely insane and decided that it would be a good idea to spend the rest of her life with me. Huh…ok, sounds good to me.
It’s not a matter of laziness, or a lack of drive. I’ve just never really strove to improve my lot in life simply because fate seems to be doing a good enough job of it on its own. <shrug>