I hope this viewpoint doesn’t hurt anyone, but I don’t agree with this saying at all. I used to think my ex-DH was an absolute arsehole for his way of thinking, but I eventually realized his point, and it did make things easier for me, actually.
His viewpoint was that you DO have a choice. I’m in a lot of pain and I was often despondent about it, and he would view it as if I still wanted to live, then I was choosing the pain. Which made me SO angry. But he was right. And it’s given me a much better feeling of control - I’m less despondent now, feeling that yes, I do want to stay alive, that’s the choice I’m making (there are other options), so I’m choosing the pain, too.
I cannot think of a single situation in life in which you don’t have a choice. But if that choice is something you can’t live with or something you don’t want to do more than your current situation, then in fact you DO choose the current situation. I wanted to live more than I wanted to be pain-free; that is my choice every day so far. I know someday it may not be.
But if you have unbearable physical or emotional pain unbearable, you could kill yourself. If you choose not to, because of your children or spouse or dogs or etc., then staying alive IS your choice. Maybe you’re in an incredibly difficult situation, one where people say “I don’t know how you do it.” I mean, you do have a choice. You could run away tomorrow and ditch your responsibilities. You could put a child with severe SEN or an elderly parent in residential care and never think of them again. But if you’re NOT running away, you’re making a choice every day, about the kind of person you want to be (not someone who deserts your child, or parent, or family).
I think for some people this can be helpful, to feel like they do have more control over the situation than maybe they realize. That there ARE choices. Maybe for some people that makes it much harder - they are only able to endure because they tell themselves there’s absolutely no choice. I understand life is so hard that each of us has our own way of viewing it.
And I completely accept that other people may have opposite viewpoints and I may be wrong. This is just the viewpoint on things like this that helps me keep going.