To dislike it when people take too much credit for their excellent life choices

[colourdilemma]

And are judgemental of those whose don't come up to scratch by their standards?

I don't think there are actually many of us who can claim huge credit for things that have gone well. More, I think those who are okay, settled, financially stable should be thanking their lucky stars that they had any of the flowing leg ups that made them able to make choices in life that worked out well:

1. parents who valued education
2. living in an area the had good schools
3. having parents who were emotionally stable enough to give them confidence and support
4. having a parentsl household income in childhood/early adulthood that let them take risks and or stay in education
5. having good enough physical and mental health to get through school/training/education
6. having academic/emotional ability and aptitudes for so called "good" jobs
7. meeting the right friends/partners
8. not having anything go disastrously wrong job wise/financially
9. having a crystal ball
10. a lot of luck

I could go on. Personally, I have a degree, financial security, a stable family now and a job that I can earn well in. But if I track my "success" back I would be better to describe it as a very precariously balanced, sometimes nearly disastrous series of part chosen, part chose me events. Isn't everyone pretty much the same?

This strikes me as why the tax credits debate is so horrible and why I dislike the phrase "hard working families" so very much.

And please forgive me if describing my position in the way I have sounds smug in any way; I do not remotely feel like that. I have long term mental health issues, my parents are a mess and I struggle hugely with parenting my three kids. So how b**y unfair is it that I seem to get away with it scot free because of some earning potential and financial independence?

Somebody famous like Newton once said "I am standing on the shoulders of giants" about the research and scientists that went before him and, even without getting into what a screwed up way this society chooses to judge success, I think anyone who has this "success" should think carefully about where it came from. Hard work, absolutely, but others work hard and don't enjoy the fruits so much.

I find the phrase "everyone has choices" annoying. No they don't. My son won't have choices.

I do agree, to a certain extent.

However, my DP grew up in care. Left school with no qualifications, set up his own business at 17 and now runs three businesses. He has never had a penny from anyone, never been allowed to borrow money, never taken benefits as he was too young when he started up. Everything he's achieved has been through his own hard work.

He has had a very unlucky life, but doesn't blame anyone and gets on and does things.

I admire him greatly.

OurBlanche plenty of poor children are intelligent, but without access to books, the internet etc at home etc? If you are unfortunate enough to have the combination of poverty with parents who are not well educated or who don't have the work ethic then your chances are not as good as they could be?

I think knowing people who have been dealt a bad hand by life and manage and get on with it clearly puts your own good fortune in relief.

I see the next generation in my family who are mixing with a lot of fortunate peers having a rather judgemental views. I hope life experience and a clear eye will improve their attitude but then again they could end up in a mental cul de sac like poor Jeremy Hunt! (My current least favourite Cabinet Know-nothing!)

YANBU

My sister does this no matter how lucky she has been and she was incredibly lucky (think golden child,1:1 education no SN,family support HUGE financial family support that is still current).

Yes ofcourse she has grabbed those opourties with both hands and yes she studied hard and yes of course that is to her credit but no amount of warped thinking can take away the fact that the leg up she had (and still has) in the world is purely down to luck.

Astoundingly she also puts other people's successes down to little else but luck. And despite a salary of 200k plus with almost no household bills or childcare to fund and her children being privately educated without her having to fund it she also thinks she's poverty stricken.

I find the two things often go hand in hand

in case nobody else has linked it

dilbert.com/strip/2015-10-13

OP, do you not think there is any truth in the saying 'the harder you work, the luckier you get'?

If you have a great life is that not enough of a reward for whatever work went into creating that life. Why do people need acknowledgement as well?

OP, do you not think there is any truth in the saying 'the harder you work, the luckier you get'?

I agree that for me personally the harder I work the luckier I have got. Although right now I do very little and the luck keeps on coming. However lots of people work far harder than me and have less in all sorts of ways. So the statement can work for the individual but you can't compare different people.

I agree that there is an element of luck in most success stories.

Quite separately, I think there is very little luck involved in building a stable, two-parent home that has no more than two children, and this is IMO the greatest mitigation against poverty that exists.

You might get very unlucky in that your spouse dies or suddenly becomes abusive or an addict, but you can control for the latter two by taking your time in selecting your mate.

This 'oh it is all down to luck' mentality smacks somewhat of the explanation given by the families of honor killing victims for why they claim no responsibility for the deaths. 'Oh, it was all god's will'

There IS such thing as fecklessness, and there IS such thing as making a conscious decision to go down a good or bad path. The idea that you are pre-allocated a personality type that consigns you to a life that comes to you regardless of the choices you make is the sort of nonsense only usually rears its head with swivel-eyed religious types.

Some people have the wherewithal to either overcome poor luck, or run with good luck, and some people just don't. The first is obviously much harder to do than the latter, but not impossible. Life is hideously unfair from the day we are born. People born and living in the uk have a great many advantages over those born poor in the third world. I don't think anyone would deny that. But we can't have a totally level playing field anywhere: even if it's just the pure luck of sustained good health, there will be people with more and less advantages than you, always. We have to play the hands we are dealt, we have no choice.

Gruffalo plenty of poor children are intelligent, but without access to books, the internet etc at home etc? If you are unfortunate enough to have the combination of poverty with parents who are not well educated or who don't have the work ethic then your chances are not as good as they could be? As was the case with DH and myself. I was trying to say 'don't be so patronising' without actually saying it, to be honest.

We were born pre-internet, it only arrived when we were already adult, home owning etc. It is not essential, even in our 1st world lives. We both also have a number of family members who have never worked, they have never been lucky enough to get a job, though their siblings and friends have!

My chances were, on paper, utterly shite, if your thoughts are correct, as were DHs. But that has never defined or restricted us. So which bit of our current lifestyle was down to luck? Or am I supposed to think I was lucky enough to be born abnormal, when compared to my class, my position in society?

Pah! That comes back to both class snobbery and a cosmic capriciousness that I don't believe in.

But yes, the harder you work the luckier you get does it for me!

Both the good and bad things in my life are very definitely closely related to choices I've made.

A combination of the two, in most cases.

I am surrounded by academic people, and am frequently baffled that the privately educated (and we're talking a large percentage at the best boarding schools in the U.K), wealthy, white, men, often put their success down to their own hard work. Not really. They were given the resources to play the game and 'talk the talk' right from the start. Of course, they are academically bright, but the failure to acknowledge the huge importance that their upbringing played is most peculiar.

Me: Foster care, alcoholic violent parents, three years of sexual abuse by neighbor resulting in a court case at 16, deaf, in mainstream high school with no special needs provision and a poor pass rate (the whole educational authority on the Island is now in special measures).

I now have the same level of academic success as my peers, but it's taken me quite a bit longer. I've a massive case of 'imposter syndrome', and I have had to work a damn sight harder and longer than the aforementioned group to get here.

Yet say that, and sometimes you are accused of bitterness or jealousy. It's not that: it's the inability of some to see that it's not as easy as simply working hard.

My sister still lives at 'home', in a council house. Has never had a job in her thirties, relies on benefits, and has one child with fairly complex special needs. She is the target of 'Daily Mail' readers who scream 'get a job': but it is not that simple - this is an area where the only jobs tend to be in the tourist trade (during the season) or at a supermarket (nothing wrong with that, but would leave her unable to care for my nephew, and effectively worse off). She has plans to take an access course to get into the OU in a year or two, so she is trying. But given her background, it's bloody damn hard. There is a very real poverty trap on the Island, and I was fortunate enough to be able to study my way out.

Not denying the role of personal responsibility, but it is a lot more nuanced and complicated than the Daily Mail brigade would have you suggest.

I come from an immigrant community. Children and grandchildren of immigrants who came to this country with nothing.
Ok so they were lucky in that they were able to come to this country but as far as I know, their children had the same access to education as anyone else.
Those children are now doctors, accountants, dentists, teachers, restaurant owners etc
Yes they had supportive parents but what they achieved was down to hard work too.
They didn't have to work hard. They could've just found menial work or not worked at all.
I know people who took second jobs as taxi drivers or pizza deliverers when things got tough. It might be luck that they could get a job but even after knock backs they persevered and would have done anything and everything to achieve.

Health and support are the two main things that you have to be lucky with. I don't know anyone who worked really hard but achieved nothing because of bad luck.

Gary Player said, 'the harder I practice, the luckier I get'.

Clearly luck has a part in success, but vision and hard work are at least equal contributors.

I don't know. DH and I have friends who have completely squandered all the good cards life as baby boomers has dealt them, by being unbelievably profligate with money. We are all mid fifties on decent salaries but they are shocked that DH and I are mortgage and debt free. They would be even more shocked if we ever let on about our savings and investments.

Thing is, that they jibed us about our tight fisted two weeks camping in France, when they were taking their kids for a fortnight at Disney World. And about our lack of designer gear, and even cooking instead of eating out half the week.

They are actually nice people and it is horrible to think of them drudging in jobs they have grown to hate when we are planning an early retirement.

It's not about luck but opportunities...some people are gifted more opportunity than others by being born into a stable family or privately educated i'm in no way denying that but it's how you use those opportunities that determines success.

I think most successful people have the canny ability to grasp opportunities or take risks that work favourably for them which isn't solely luck. You can't be successful by luck alone unless you win the lottery and neither will just hard work alone make you successful therefore the over-riding element of success has got to be personal ingenuity

And it depends on one's definition of success. If you have an aim of running a marathon in under 4 hours, a lottery win won't help you much.

The problem I have with the almost pious 'we all make choices' script is that you have got to be fucking deluded if you think all choices are free, honest, real choices.

I took an overdose once. Technically I chose to do that, physically took the overdose. It was my 'choice'. I would argue it wasn't really a true choice at all, in fact in the weeks up to then I felt like I had no other choice. I was in an abusive relationship and unravelling at the speed of light with no family or other support.

There are loads, and loads, and LOADS, of similar 'choices' - most a lot more mundane and dull, that led to that critical point for me.

If a person has had a childhood with abuse or boring old neglect, or has other unresolved trauma in their past - they aren't making choices from a from an informed and consenting place.

Yeah Sarah Im sure many women will take your sage advice and are busy polishing their crystal balls as i type.

Oh and lighninggirl You did sneer at me when i brought up poor housing on a thread which i did because costs to the NHS were brought up.

You told me it was a boring way to kill a thread.

Yeah Sarah Im sure many women will take your sage advice and are busy polishing their crystal balls as i type.

Helena I feel pretty sorry for you if you feel that women have little or no ability to filter their prospective mates for duds.

Some women might not have had a positive male in their lives when they were growing up or seen how a good relationship works, that may mean they have little or no ability to filter their prospective mates for duds.

You are twisting what i said. Probably to try and deflect from your victim blaming.