> It makes people uncomfortable to think that success is mostly a matter of luck.
I constantly hear this sentiment and don't think it makes people uncomfortable at all. If anything it is the opposite, people cling to this idea to absolve themselves of responsibility for their own situation.
What makes people far more uncomfortable is the nagging feeling that success isn't mostly a matter of luck. Success is a choice in life that requires restraint, sacrifice, an appetite for risk, and resilience.
But if you follow some basic rules (finish high school, don't have kids before marriage, don't do drugs or smoke, minimise alcohol, eat healthy and exercise, don't buy things to impress others), you have a very good chance of being successful in life. Obviously we can't all be billionaires or whatever, but you can definitely live a fairly comfortable and modest life.
Ironically, people I know who did the most drugs in high school (myself included) are the most successful out of the people I know. The straight-laced A students are all way behind.
Yes, I know kids who did drugs (partied as they say) and have some success in life. I also knew some kids who did drugs and barely graduated or dropped out and did poorly or are just hanging on and a handful who didn’t make it out of young adulthood due to those choices.
What we need are statistics to tell us what is more likely, not our particular anecdotes.
I did plenty of drugs too and am doing just fine as well. Not a million or billionaire, but that is a pretty tough standard to meet.
That being said, only drugs I ever did were weed, acid, shrooms, MDMA, and trying the odd pharmaceutical. Never any opoids of any sort, never meth etc.
And in terms of broad advice, I think not doing drugs is still a fairly consistent rule for good outcomes.
Yes, this is my point. You are the people who want to believe that all it takes to be comfortable in life is to “follow some basic rules.” Putting aside that the circumstances of your birth are already a huge matter of luck, I’ll point to the entire US working class and unemployed college graduates as evidence to the contrary.
At some point those of us who have grown up in this economy stopped believing in fairy tales and bootstraps. There were a million points from my upbringing to now that could have diverted me from the middle class, so I’m not looking down on my underemployed peers as inferior beings for their struggles.
> Putting aside that the circumstances of your birth are already a huge matter of luck
This is another one of those points that sounds superficially plausible on the surface but makes little sense once you think it through. The circumstances of my birth weren't a matter of luck. My (married) parents decided to have 4 children of which I was one. Before doing this they both finished high school, and stayed away from drugs. They also tried to live healthily etc (but certainly weren't monks). They weren't going to have sex and then a child might pop into existence in Uganda. The only way the whole "your birth was luck" thing makes any sense is if you perceive yourself to be an atomised individual with no deeper ties to the family you came from or the choices that were made by your ancestors who preceded you.
Like I said, people are EXTREMELY comfortable with the handwaving of "it's all luck anyway". They won't even take responsibility for themselves and their own lives, so asking them to also feel responsibility to their children/grandchildren/descendants is even more of a foreign concept.
As for "I'm not looking down on my underemployed peers as inferior beings for their struggles" those are your words, not mine. I certainly don't look down on my struggling friends/family either, but I am also not going to withhold judging them based on the actions they take. Because very often they also KNOW they shouldn't be doing what they are doing, but choose to do it anyway.
Weakness corrupts as much as power, and it is wise not to forget that.
Before you are conceived, before you even become a zygote, who rolls the dice for which womb you'll end up in? Who decides whether you'll be in the womb of a Japanese mother, an American mother, or a Greek mother? Do we as individuals have any control over which country we are born in?
To pretend as if this is not pure chance (luck) is bonkers.
Or are you saying it was just luck my mom got pregnant then? She just fell asleep one night, the stork visited, and then she woke up pregnant?
I think you don't understand how sex or genetics work, I am 50% my mother's dna and 50% my father's. It's not like they were going to have sex and then I would be born with the genetic code of two entirely different people.
Well duh, noone who has ever lived has willed themselves into existence. But just because you didn't will yourself into existence, that doesn't then imply that the circumstances of your existence are based on luck.
My parents chose to have a kid, where else would I be born except in the country where my mother chose to live? There was 0 luck involved, I wasn't going to randomly pop into existence in Mongolia when my parents decided to have a kid while both living in Australia.
If you apply your reasoning to any other area in life you can see how silly it is. If you put in a lot of work/effort into building a car, is the existence of the car the product of "luck"? After all it had no more choice in where it was created than a person.
>If you apply your reasoning to any other area in life you can see how silly it is. If you put in a lot of work/effort into building a car, is the existence of the car the product of "luck"? After all it had no more choice in where it was created than a person.
That is a false analogy. We're talking about you being born, not you putting effort into building a car.
Why are you switching the argument around to where your parents decided to settle? The whole point is about where you are born, not the area your parents decide to give birth in.
If you can't intuitively understand the relevance of where my parents live (more specifically my pregnant mother) to where I am born, then I am not going to be able to make you understand it.
You seem to be getting hung up on the fact that when two people decide to create a car they are creating an inanimate object (which they own in totality) and when they create a child they create a person with human rights and that will develop into it's own autonomous individual.
But this difference has absolutely 0 relevance to the question of whether or not the circumstances of your birth are the result of luck. Either they both are (which I think you can see is silly) or neither are (which is true but seems to be an idea you are resistant to for some reason).
Like I said at the start, this whole "the circumstances of your birth are luck" is a truism (in the philosophical sense) without any real thought put into whether or not it makes any sense. It could be luck in the deterministic sense of "the entire universe is pre-ordained" but if you believe in free will for the individual at all in any area, then the circumstances of one's birth are not luck.
They are not luck for your parents but you are not your parents.
One of the problems here is that there is one position that everything is either the result of my decisions (ie under my control) or it is luck (ie it is not under my control) and another that defines luck much more narrowly.
Anything that happens to you as a result of someone else's decision is luck for you, even though it's a controlled decision for them. And you had no control over your conception because you didn't exist at the time.
Or, to put this in the simplest possible terms: "other people's free will is your luck".
> But if you follow some basic rules (finish high school, don't have kids before marriage, don't do drugs or smoke, minimise alcohol, eat healthy and exercise, don't buy things to impress others), you have a very good chance of being successful in life.
The discontent in millenials nowadays is exactly because they are peddled that fairy-tale myth.
"Get a degree and get a job, you can will be able to afford a house and a family with children."
It might have worked for the older generation but it sure as heck doesn't work now. Why do you think "hustle" culture is so pushed right now? Our parents didn't need to "hustle" to afford these basic things.
> "Get a degree and get a job, you can will be able to afford a house and a family with children."
This is still true, you just might have to move to a different place from where you grew up to get it. You know, like enormous amounts of our parents/grandparents/ancestors did (why did people come to the USA in the first place? Lack of access to housing where they were from ;p )
> finish high school, don't have kids before marriage, don't do drugs or smoke, minimise alcohol, eat healthy and exercise, don't buy things to impress others,
none of these correlate at all with the successful people I know.
I constantly hear this sentiment and don't think it makes people uncomfortable at all. If anything it is the opposite, people cling to this idea to absolve themselves of responsibility for their own situation.
What makes people far more uncomfortable is the nagging feeling that success isn't mostly a matter of luck. Success is a choice in life that requires restraint, sacrifice, an appetite for risk, and resilience.
But if you follow some basic rules (finish high school, don't have kids before marriage, don't do drugs or smoke, minimise alcohol, eat healthy and exercise, don't buy things to impress others), you have a very good chance of being successful in life. Obviously we can't all be billionaires or whatever, but you can definitely live a fairly comfortable and modest life.