To think some people are just unlucky?

[Iseverynametaken]

Starting to feel like I might be unlucky. Seems like things always just, not only go wrong, but seemingly all at once. I try very hard to be positive and am a very caring and giving person so at times selfishly think why me? I feel like I notice some people manage to just coast through life and things seem to always go their way, while others, try as they might, seem to just always have a hard time. I do have anxiety and perhaps look at other peoples lives through rose tinted glasses, but even my husband agrees we do seem to cop the short end of the stick alot.

Not wanting to have a pity party over here, but just having a hard time staying upbeat at the moment! (Hoping that things surely turn around soon)

Oliversmumsarmy, go on Google and search Confirmation Bias.

how you handle the worst situation is down to you. So how would you handle your child being abducted, raped and murdered by a stranger?

we all agree that some extreme scenario are just bad luck - losing a child being one, and you have given the extreme example here.

It's lucky or unlucky to be born in a wealthy and happy environment, or in a poor and abusive one. Prince George and a little boy born in a war zone or refugee camp don't have the same start in life! That doesn't have to define you though, and most people don't have to experience these extremes.

Man of the other "bad luck" example can be significantly different depending on how you handle them.

Like most people, I have been made redundant once or twice. I never thought about it as bad luck, it was just a pain and had to work hard to find another job quickly.

I guarantee you that for some people the life of the most "unlucky" person on this thread (bare the parent of an abused and killed child!) is a dream.

I'm a very negative person. Always pessimistic. I believe that every silver lining has a cloud and as one door closes, another slams in your face.

Yet, despite my attitude, I've had a bloody great life. Great spouse, healthy family, plenty of money. So all this positive/negative energy stuff is crap.

Irma Yes it has a cause. So it was not the babies fault. In the same way my cousin being murdered had a cause, but it was not her fault. I don't think it is helpful to talk about luck or lack of luck. I do think it is important to recognise that bad things can happen to people that they could have prevented, and other bad things happen that they could not have done anything to prevent.
So none of us have a choice over what families we are born into and where in the world we are born. We could be born in a refugee camp, to dysfunctional drug addicts, or a caring loving family with the money to bring us up okay.
Similarly none of us have a choice of whether we are born with a disability or a chronic health problem. That can mean we do not get the education we should, that we can not care for ourselves in adulthood, repeated surgeries or a shortened life expectancy.
There are things we control. We control whether we take the opportunities we are given, whether we avoid problem people, etc. But even in these, our background will have an influence. So if we are brought up by dysfunctional drug addicts, we have no blueprint of what a healthy relationship looks like, and so we will find it harder to have a good relationship.

I am not keen, like most people, on people who refuse to do anything to improve their life. But I also recognise the many things I have had no control over.
The reason I hate the narrative of positive people being lucky, is it wrongly blames people for bad things that happen to them.

thedisorganisedmum Most people I know have been made redundant at least once. I just see that as something tough that happens, like your parents dying. Not an example of someone being unlucky, just normal life shit that most people get through. Although I also recognise if you have other disadvantages such as a severe disability, being made redundant may mean you can not find another job.

Sending hugs. I seem to have one thing after another or sometimes loads of things at once to deal with and hope for a quiet period but that never happens.

I think a lot of people who seem to have infinite good luck stage manage how they come across to others but just play down the problems. Everyone has good luck and bad luck - not in equal amounts, it's true, but no one goes through life untouched by fortune or misfortune. The difference is in what we dwell on and how we handle opportunities that come our way.

People's expectations are different as well; some people would consider themselves lucky with a relatively small amount of things or a simple life whereas others feel unlucky if they don't get the exact career they want for example. But you have to decide what's important to you; I've never been a big career person but security is important to me so I picked something stable (others might see it as boring but the stability and lack of crazy hours etc. is important to me). I do agree some people seem to have more of their fair share of bad luck though, especially when it comes to health. I know people who have chronic conditions which mean they will never be able to do all the things they want and in no way do they deserve that.

As an aside; I don't find the whole 'someone else is worse off' thing makes me feel better when I'm feeling unlucky, it just makes me feel bad/guilty for those other people. But sometimes it motivates me to do something to help so I guess that's not a bad thing.

"woe is me' attitude is what is bringing misfortunate to your life.
You need to discover the Law of Attraction.
Positive things happen to positive people. It's proven."

I am also a very positive person. I cared for my DH when he was dying. I started in health care and went on to a BA. I've spurred my children on to do their best, two with SN, both doing amazingly well.

I count my blessings. I'll never have it as tough as my Grandmother, as a LP etc. I'm aware of people's lives, globally. My Father was SA. I have Friends from around Africa. I've been born into privilege. I was body and brain able, I was fertile and could breastfeed.

But I'm bloody unlucky, when compared to people born in the same time and place, in some ways.

My Nigerian Friend's Father lived through the Biafran crisis. Did he survive, when four million people didn't, because he was a positive person? Likewise the survivers of any holocaust.

Did her Brother get kidnapped, or his Friends ritually killed because they wasn't positive enough? Why were they chosen that day, on the crowded bus?

Why have her two SILs died from a heart condition, out of 15 Siblings, before the age of 25? Both leaving children.

The Law of Attraction is bollocks, go back and ask the many people taken/born to bad slave owners. It's victim blaming.

I'm a very negative person. Always pessimistic. I believe that every silver lining has a cloud and as one door closes, another slams in your face.

But that attitude may help you take measures to prevent or to minimise the bad things that happen.
Whereas optimistic people may not see the risks.

E.g. house price crashes. Optimists will have borrowed over the value of their purchase when prices were already too high. Pessimists will have made sure they had a decent deposit. In the long run pessimists are likely to encounter less problems.

Or pessimists expect things to go wrong, so are happy when they don't.

But pessimism is not the same as dwelling on bad things that happen.

Things come from left field and I seem to spend months even years trying to sort things out.

As an example

I spent 6 years sorting out the £7000 Tax Credits over payment I was told I owed.

Problem we have is we have never claimed Tax Credits in the first place.

I was taken to court for not doing my tax return. Except I had and had a letter thanking me for my tax return.

Only issue was I didn’t get the court date (postal strike) so got fined and had to pay for the solicitors fees as well.

Managed to get the fine off but was still out of pocket.

Oliversmumsarmy, if you can use an astrochart to know that Kennedy shouldn't have gone to Dallas on the day he was shot, or that Cameron held the referendum on a day that meant he would lose, why couldn't you have worked out the best day to return your tax form to avoid all this hassle

I think most people have good and bad experiences. I think the difference is your attitude towards those situations and whether you do the ‘woe is me’ or the ‘ these things happen’. If you tend to glass half full, are optimistic and generally positive then chances are you will be ‘ luckier’ in many areas of life because it’s more attract to have a bouncy, happy partner/colleague/employee/friend than it is to have a moaning Minnie.
Counting blessings and not expecting perfection in everything tends to lead to a happier life overall. Some people definitely bring misfortune and misery on themselves but some people are undoubtedly born with significant advantages.

Lifecraft what do you mean? I did do my tax return and had a letter confirming they had received my tax return.

Probably if I had been into astrology at that time it would have said I would have difficulties surrounding paperwork.

I warned friend (who is going through a divorce) that she should be very careful signing any documents as she needed to really understand what she was signing.

Her solicitor gave her a letter to sign, something she would have normally just have signed without reading thoroughly. But because I warned her to be careful what she signed she brought it home so we could read it through carefully.

It had a potentially devastating mistake in it. If she had signed she would have been agreeing for a certain property to be sold for a fraction of its value. Her solicitor had put down the wrong address.

I must consult one of these charts - what horses are running at Cheltenham today?

Aside from the obvious "out of nowhere" terrible bad luck, I agree that it is luck/bad luck is often in the eye of the beholder. Bil got made redundant many (over 20) years ago. He is still going on about it. Talks about the "terrible thing" that happened to him. Pil would talk in hushed tones about "bil's bad luck". In the meantime, I lost a job and dh carelessly lost three!

IrmaFayLea

It could work on horses.

You would need all of their times, dates and places of birth to start with.

I don't necessarily agree. I think it's more likely everyone is more or less equally unlucky, but some people are more private about it than others. (Except in cases of major bad luck and devestation, losing a child, dying of cancer etc).

I have a sibling who I know thinks I've had "everything handed to me". Ignoring the fact that I have had, financially, literally nothing handed to me, me and my husband have struggled with mental health problems, physical health problems, repeated job losses, no money, insane stress, family members nearly dying, etc etc over the last few years, all of which we have kept close and not shared even a hint of with her. I know she has quite spiteful attitude that I'm the "charmed" sibling, and she has worse luck (even though she has a great job and blessed life compared to many). She shares every minor misfortune with the world (ie lost a £50 note, got locked out of house etc), whereas we keep even the worst luck private. So I think a lot of it has to do with attitude/outlook. I would also still consider myself very fortunate despite everything, whereas some people consider themselves very unfortunate because say they've missed a promotion at work. It's all about perspective and outlook I think.

I agree with WarmCoffee. I know people who advertise their woes to the world and barely acknowledge their good fortune, and others who do the opposite. The upbeat ones are often judged for having an easy ride.

IrmaFayLear You've said exactly what I was trying to say with your BIL example, but much more succinctly!

I totally agree. I am very fortunate in that I have coasted along quite nicely with only a few really shitty things happening to me (a couple of friends dying very young, a few nasty injuries etc, so unfortunate and upsetting yes, but nothing truly horrendous like being widowed young or loosing a parent as a young child like my friends wife and child).

But I know a few people who have been dealt tremendously shit hands who absolutely do not deserve them. It's bad enough from the outside but it must be really crap to be the one suffering set back after set back.

I sort of agree. I’ve had so many setbacks in my life, and some have been absolutely horrendous! I’m an intolerably optimistic person though, and try to see times of ‘bad luck’ as things I can learn from (even the really awful stuff, and even if that seems impossible at the time). I don’t often make hard times known publicly, I keep the nitty gritty details of my life private with only close friends, so imagine people might think I’m coasting on luck. It’s really not the case!

I think there is a combination of both. To a certain degree resilience will help some people cope better with certain situations than others. I remember one of my friends moaning that I had always been so lucky and everything had been handed to me on a plate at work. She was wrong and a bit bitter that I has routes to progress and she didn’t. I had to deal with things in childhood that were horrific but I had something in me that drove me to succeed despite that. In the workplace I worked bloody hard and was rewarded for that. However, by good genetics and interested parents I am academically clever. That part is arguably luck.

More broadly, there is clearly a massive element of luck (particularly in relation to health) but for me, the biggest issue is the lack of control many people have. When you can predict gcse outcome at the age of 3 or by a mother’s level of education you know that things aren’t started on a level playing field. At the margins some people with a bad start in life will have the determination to succeed against statistics and others with all the cards will fuck up but family background and wealth still plays an enormous part in social and economic outcomes. Whether you see that as luck or just a sad indictment of the inequalities in our society is a matter of perception.

I just think it's life.

I don't believe in good/bad luck or good/bad karma. I think people like to attain some level of control over something that is vastly uncontrollable and label things as lucky or unlucky.

You can't control what happens to you, pessimist or optimist.

I always think of this story, with this sort of thread come up:

Maybe (Taoist story)

There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. "Such bad luck," they said sympathetically.

"Maybe," the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. "How wonderful," the neighbors exclaimed.

"Maybe," replied the old man. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. "Maybe," answered the farmer. The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. "Maybe," said the farmer.