I'm not a defeatist. The comment I replied to was an oversimplification of a complex problem. Some people can't just acquire social skills just like that. Some people have Asperger's and other problems that obstruct the natural flow of how most people function.

And what I said has come from experience. The outside world does not think the way we do. Most of the outside world actually IS defeatist........because they've never had to try. They see you try and wonder why you even try in the first place when you have it so hard. They can't comprehend the concept of trying.

Well is a person really going to improve, when the frequency of the action is below a certain point?

If a person goes to the gym every day, their health is going to improve. But what if they go once a year? Or a better analogy: They want to go the gym every day, but the doors to that gym only open once a week. So they end up working out once a week, even though they try to enter it every day. That's what this is like.

I think everything is luck. Whether or not you have a positive or defeatist attitude is as much a product of luck as whether or not you're born into a rich family. People's beliefs and attitudes are based on their experiences, which they can't control. If you were in the other person's shoes, you would be the other person, with all the same beliefs and attitudes. Believing that you would have lived another person's life differently is just idle daydreaming.

But I don't think luck is a trait (let alone genetic). I think it's just a word we use to describe people who have had statistically abnormal experiences--more positive or negative traits than average, more positive or negative outcomes than average. That's a bit like ascribing the trait "wet" to a person who happens to live in a place where it rains a lot. I understand how it can feel like a trait subjectively, though, because I feel cursed, too.

And there you go again, stating your opinions as fact. You clearly recognise when others oversimplify issues yet proceed to do the same when generalising "most of the outside world". They just can't comprehend... well, you don't know what people can and can't comprehend, what they have to deal with, how hard they have to try. Everyone has limitations, some more than others. And some people have better advantages than others. So what?

And, yes, if what you wrote in this thread is at all representative of your actual attitude, you are indeed a defeatist. According to your posts, you have resigned yourself to inevitable failure, going as far as to anticipate that nature itself would somehow conspire against you and precipitate your defeat. This is textbook defeatism. Question is to what extent are you open to acknowledging the irrationality of this position? If you are absolutely convinced that the world is against you, then, I'm afraid, there's nothing any of us can do or say that would change your perspective and all we are doing here is enabling and reaffirming your defeatism. If, on the other hand, you recognise that your pessimism and defeatism is a problem, then you can look for practical ways to deal with it. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean that I, or others here, will have answers for you and be able to resolve your issues, but it does mean that there are resources out there that could potentially guide you do a different outlook on life.

The universe isn't protecting anyone.

It appears that you think some people have it easy in life, while you have it hard. You're the only one who has to actually try or work hard to accomplish anything. I know some people with this same attitude. It tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. These people usually do in fact end up with little to show for themselves. The one thing they're good at is thinking up of excuses.

Perhaps they're operating under the correct assumption that they have to work hard to accomplish the same things that almost everyone else does effortlessly as a stepping stone to their real ambitions. It's not an excuse if it's a demonstrable reality.

How do you know? This is one of those atheism vs agnostic debates. You don't know for certain whether this is how it works.

Dropping out of high school is not something a rational person would do. The safer option would be to pursue your dreams while simultaneously finishing high school so you have a backup plan. And had his dreams not worked out, I'm pretty sure people would blame him for dropping out and use that against him.


Never said others don't have to work hard. Just said that their hard work pays off. Whereas for some of us, things outside our control makes the hard work redundant.

its a big no then, i don't believe in genetic luck and i haven't seen any justification for that belief

It really do feel like that. If you had 10 coins and performed 100 flips on each coin, you'd on average get 50 heads and 50 tails for each coin..........and then you reach the 10th coin and it gets 99 heads and 1 tail. You then wonder, " Is there something wrong with this coin? Why does it keep landing on heads ". But thinking of that as anything other than chance makes you a defeatist, apparently.

That's not an opinion, that's what I've observed. For every 5 people, there might be 1 who will get where you're coming from and empathize with you. That's just 20% of the population. The remaining 80% think you're just a weirdo and don't want anything to do with you. I don't know what your personal problems are, but as someone with a speech impediment and OCD, this is what I've experienced. Maybe you've had a different experience so see things differently.

I can tell you from my experiences, whenever I've tried to socially self improve and practice talking to people, they'd rather I stopped talking. So to follow the general advice on this thread and '' keep trying and not be a defeatist ''....that would be keep talking to people when they want you to stop talking.

Different things require different amounts of effort from different people. OP used someone with Asperger's as an example... Well, one who's diagnosed with Asperger's may have to put more effort into their social interactions than someone who is neurotypical, and you're right, this may indeed be a demonstrable reality. But it is not something that can be generalised to "most" of the populations. For starters, Asperger's is a spectrum disorder, meaning some people have it easier or harder than others. Then it seems like women with Asperger's are much better at adapting and masking than men. Not only that but there are plenty of things that someone with Asperger's would excel at and require much less effort to do than someone who is neurotypical. In addition, someone who's neurotypical may have had a traumatic experience that left them unable to socialise full stop, in which case even a person on the lower end of the spectrum might have it "easier" than their neurotypical counterpart.

All things are relative, and as someone who recognises the need for nuance OP should be able to understand this. The issue, however, is not that OP has a hard time accomplishing things but that, according to them, everything they "do ends up in failure" with nature/universe conspiring against them. This is the irrational self-fulfilling part. Not the fact that someone might have to work harder on certain things than another person, I don't think anyone would disagree with that.

Your experience is not representative of the world population. It is not a fact about said population. It is your subjective and highly biased interpretation of a personal experience. You can't extrapolate that to "most of the outside world."

I think its a mindset, some people are just on auto pilot/ flow through life mode. Things go near perfect for some ppl but they take it for granted because they dont know any better. Then you have people who have been on cloud 9 forever, i call it fairytale land.

Well that's what happens when everything you try comes crashing down because of some reason or another. Without going into much detail, a few years back I put all my heart and soul into building something (with the help of another person, but it was still me doing 99% of the work). After months of building it every day, it ended up working and had tremendous potential. But that same person wrecked the entire thing and it died in one day. Before it even had a chance to begin.

It's hard to keep going when nearly everything you've tried has followed this pattern.

I strongly doubt this. In fact, I would bet that it's next to impossible to fail at everything. And even if you did fail at everything (which is an absurd notion, since you simply wouldn't exist to even try), it would still not be evidence of the universe conspiring against you.

Not only that but you are not the most reliable narrator of the events, as your perceptions are so heavily skewed toward pessimism and defeatist interpretations. Saying you put "a lot of effort" into something is devoid of any information by which any of us here can realistically assess the risk of failure, adequacy of your efforts, and whether or not you stood any chance of success. It is for this reason that I remain skeptical of your efforts. Please understand that I am not saying that you are exaggerating or that you don't experience distress because of your experiences. What I am saying is that your account of the events is heavily biased and unreliable and because of that it is impossible to comment on the soundness of your observations/interpretations, specifically whether or not any of your failures were avoidable and what, if anything, can be done to improve your chances of success in the future.

To go back to the main subject of your thread. I do not believe in luck as some sort of outside force that arbitrarily affects people's fortunes, to me that's just nonsense. The way I see things - a person has to first register an event, establish a relationship between said event and their life or immediate circumstances (or the life or circumstances of another person observed), this event has to have some discernable impact on the person, which then can be subjectively judged to be either favourable or unfavourable to the person in question. Luck is just a sense of agency that some people bestow upon the most notable of the consequences of such events and their subjective value.

To illustrate how unreliable, and context dependent our subjective interpretations of the events are, here's an old Taoist story:

Oh, I wasn't referring to OP, and I agree it's best to be analytical and realistic rather than just attributing failure to some mystical force or cosmic conspiracy. Reality is bleak enough anyway.

Those are likely overgeneralizations too, and not applicable to everyone affected. Imagine being stuck with all the debilitating effects of a disorder and none of the alleged benefits. Parents thinking you would be some kind of savant if you really tried when, really, you're just a cripple. Or people thinking you can get something at the drop of a hat just because you were born as a certain race or sex when in actuality there's something in your life that renders your supposed advantage moot. One more reason to look at the individual and their individual circumstances and ignore the gender/sex/race or whatever other label.

Ok. One might have to work hard to accomplish something that most everyone else does effortlessly, but nobody has to work hard at every single thing that others do effortlessly. For example, someone with SA has to put in a lot of effort to make friends. But another person with great social skills might have to work hard to pass math in school. Or they might have health issues and have to take special precautions in life, things that other people never even think about.

Well, that's like arguing that there's an invisible elephant in the room. Nobody knows for sure. What I do know is that it's not scientifically proven that the universe watches over certain people, while it conspires against others. I don't know anybody who has had everything easy in life. If you think you know people like this, you must know them only on a superficial level.

They are indeed and made entirely with the goal of demonstrating that populations are not as homogeneous as one might first consider. What might be true for one individual may not be true for another, even if their general circumstances are the same.

OK. This has gone on long enough and everyone has had their say. Not much more to be said here. Closed.