What makes someone a loser in life? Be honest!

[Benny91]

Just wondering what makes someone a loser in life? Is it working a low skilled job all your life? Living at home still at 40?

what are your thoughts?

People who don't take responsibility for their own life. Who see themselves as victims and therefore allow themselves to be powerless.

Those who live off parents. Who don't genuinely seek to work full-time. Who will always rely on benefits (as opposed to needing them for a period or in times of crisis).

There are caveats to those categories. The registered disabled. Carers. The elderly or infirm.

But we should all be independent for a good proportion of our lives. Depending totally on another person or the state is very very dangerous and risks losing everything, as evidenced on MN by many SAHM who lose everything when the husband has an affair.

Lack of ambition, curiosity, productivity. Lack of ability to live within their means. Producing offspring without prudence and preparation. Leeching off others. Being a passive viewer instead of an active doer.

People who aren’t where they want to be and don’t take accountability / blame others

The term loser suggests that life is a game, simply with winners and losers.

Life can be painful, hard and traumatic for many. Its not a game and most are just doing what they need to do to get through life without hurting anyone else.

I judge those who think it's as trivial as a game for everyone.

I think some of the men you read about on the relationships board who are just passengers, having kids and allowing the mum to drive everything and sort everything and then cheating/leaving/not paying maintenance/being a cocklodger. I continue to be shocked by the behaviour of some and the fact that they aren’t completely shunned- a lot of them seem to sail into new relationships while the mothers of their kids have to work to keep their head above water .

Nothing to do with jobs, I judge people who judge jobs, some of those low skilled, low paid jobs people sneer about are essential to running of society, for ages I was a bin woman, low skilled job id have happily worked in for the rest of my life, I loved it, but several health issues meant I reskilled into a desk job which is not low skilled by mn definition I assume, far better paid but brings far less to society than clean streets.
People presumably want food on their supermarket shelves? Their Amazon parcel delivered? Their elderly relatives cared for in homes? Those are all low paid jobs, look down at them at your peril.

dead beat parents, especially ones that skip out on paying maintenance with various trickery, losers

People who have no fulfillment in life.

Anyone who has forgotten what's really important in life- health and family.

People chasing likes/ fame or wealth.

Someone who goes out of their way to cause deliberate harm/ hurt others.

Others- regardless of job/ living situation have my respect.

Totally agree with this. Men that use women. May appear to be successful at life, but who would completely fall apart without a woman to prop him up. Total losers.

Wannabe and actual cocklodgers

To me a loser is simply someone who’s an adult so should know better but chooses to be a bully and gets satisfaction from making others lives miserable 🤷🏻‍♀️

Many of these people are high flyers, motivated, successful and not living at home with their parents in their 40s. Sometimes even doting family people.

People who stay in abusive relationships because they fear being alone are definitely losers.

A loser is someone who is nasty to others in my book

No, the person who is abusive is a loser. Their victim is not.

WTF??
so being a victim of abuse and being so ground down and scared makes you a loser?

A lot of people would have a different view on this if they could see the full picture of other people's lives.

Looking at the tiny amount you can know of someone's life usually makes judgement invalid.

Tough question!

My cousin is a loser. He has perfectly decent parents, but has been in and out of prison for his entire life and has never worked.

I know one guy who still lives with his parents in his 40s, works for the family business (so has never had to forge his own path), has never had a girlfriend and sort of lives to drink and mess about with his mates. He's very clever and very funny though, and a nice, warm guy, so I struggle to label him a "loser" quite so easily.

Another man I know has severe anxiety, crashed out of Uni, has lived at home for life, and mooches off of his dad's generous public sector pension (his dad was a policeman and retired in his 50s).

I think long term joblessness (ignoring the myriad reasons that cause it), or being paid for by your parents, is the theme that makes me label someone a loser. Certainly not minimum wage work though. If someone's working at something - anything - that's good enough for me.

I consider my DHs nephew a bit of a loser - he’s early 30s, lives at home with his parents, plays computer games all night, sleeps all day and eats nothing but junk food so is very overweight, he works 12 hours a week. So I think a loser is somebody who is an unmotivated teenager in an adults body I think, where there is nothing remotely adult about their life.

Not using and developing the skills they were blessed with.
No one thinks a severely learning disabled person is a loser for not being independent. We may well be in awe of them for learning to manage their own toileting.
A low average student is to be admired for supporting himself as a groundsman
A person with terrible mental health may never leave the parental home, but work remotely and be happy.
A prisoner may go on to manage a Timpsons. Amazingly well done.
But if we don't use our talents and rely on others to sort us out, we are losers until we start changing that.

If you are able bodied and do not suffer from acute depression/MH needs, then

Scroungers
Wasters
Useless fathers

However my list above when you dig a bit below the surface would usually be met with a person who is a care leaver, or suffered significant trauma, etc etc

So this late capitalist society is the loser and we are all slaves to a broken unfair system.

Bring on the riot.

Depends what you mean by a 'loser'. If you mean someone to despise, then people who leave the world poorer than they found it. People who take advantage or hurt other people or suck the joy out of opther people's lives. Plenty of those people are 'successful' in terms of jobs and material goods. Some aren't. I do know a couple of people who're still living with parents in their 40s who fit this bill - and I do judge, because they are healthy, capable adults who are just sucking the life out of everyone around them.

If you mean, what breaks someone and makes them feel as if they've lost - I think people who lose connections to those around them. I know people who've worked very low paid jobs all their lives but who are happy and have rich relationships and friendships; I know someone who lived with her mother until her mother died, but she is warm and generous and fun and funny and it would never occur to me to see her as a loser. What makes people feel they've lost in life is feeling they don't have worth, or they've missed out. Sometimes that's beause life genuinely has been horribly unfair to them, but sometimes it is also because they're people who fixate on what they don't have, and can't get out of the cycle of feeling that things can't get better and they've irrevocably 'lost' or 'failed' at life.

Without knowing reasons why they hide away and have no motivation it would be very unfair to call them a loser. Trauma and abuse in childhood can have a very adverse impact on people. It didn’t have to be physical or overt to cause damage.

Are you usually judgemental or unable to understand that you’re referring to real people who have probably trodden a difficult path in life and we’re not all plastic people suitable for Love Island viewing?

Why have you started this thread?

Posting on online forums about what makes someone a loser in life strikes me as loser-ish behaviour…

And you make that judgement with absolutely no curiosity about why that might be understandable? For example, due to the devastating impact on some people of adverse childhood experiences?

What a pity you see things in such stark monochrome, OP. And even find the matter ripe for starting a goady thread.

Do you come across many losers @Benny91? I’d be very wary of deciding someone else is a loser without having a 360 degree view of them and their history. I spend a lot of time talking to people who probably qualify in various ways as “losers” by your definition but I find that there are many reasons for lack of motivation, ambition and drive and sometimes what looks like “loser” behaviour to the outside world is actually a monumental effort given the cards they were dealt.