Everyone is born into a mess . . .
“The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift of life is yours; . . . and you alone are responsible for the quality of it.” – Dan Zadra
We are all born into circumstances beyond our control. When we are born, we don’t have control over our skin type, eye shape, full potential height or intelligence, religion, family or socio-economic status. We don’t get to choose the family dynamics we get born into, nor what kinds of people our parents are, nor the political climate.
Most people born in the United States are better off than most people in the world. Most people in first world countries have a higher subjective well being (happiness) than most people in less wealthy nations, in part because they don’t have to focus on basic needs [1, 2]. Some cultures place a different emphasis on happiness, thus skewing some of the data [3].
While we are better off objectively, and to some degree subjectively as a group, doesn’t mean that individually we all are. Children from every race and economic level are abused. In 2005 899,000 U.S. children were found to have been abused [4]. None of these children had any choice about what happened to them, more than half were under the age of 7.
On the other hand, some kids have great parents, a myriad of opportunities and a culture that supports their identities. Yet it doesn’t mean that those kids don’t have their own personal tragedies. Some poor kids have wonderful loving parents, while some rich kids have distant absentee or drug abusing parents. There are extremes on both ends, and perception also plays a role in how we see our mess.
Ultimately, we are born into some kind of mess, some messes bigger than others, and at some point, regardless of why we are in that mess, we are the only ones who can make the best of where we’ve found ourselves. It’s a part of growing up.
We can eat the mess, turn it in to fertilizer, look for the pony, or build statues of the Virgin Mary. At some point, if we want something different, we’ve got to claim ownership of the mess. This does not mean it is our fault. It is not fair, and we have the choices to make about what we want to do about that.
“The familiar story of the optimist who is sent to Hell and discovers that he’s up to his shoulders in manure. He immediately jumps into the pile of manure and gleefully starts swimming around. A pessimist walks up (they always do) and asks the optimist why he’s so happy. The optimist replies that with all this manure, there’s got to be a pony somewhere.” ~unknown
Sometimes people will help us with our mess and it helps us get out, and sometimes people help us with the mess and it only gets bigger. Sometimes the people that got us into the mess want to help get us out, and it may or may not result in actual help. And there are some people determined to keep piling on the mess. It’s important that we talk about the messes and how we can reduce or fix the problem.
No one is going to be as determined as you are to get you out of the mess.
One mess that comes to mind is the story of a little girl born to poor unwed teenagers. She was raised in poverty by her grandmother until she was six. At six she went back to live with her mother. She was sexually abused by three relatives, the abuse included rape at the age of nine. By fourteen she ran away and had her own teenage birth, shortly after which her son died. So far it looks like a lot of mess to be born into.
That person, who started a life in poverty and abuse, grew up and into Oprah, an amazing, dynamic, charitable, successful, billionaire woman, with her own book club
I will probably have to read one of the many bios to figure out how Oprah become who she is today. She had a lot of mess to dig out of. It isn’t something that would have happened over night. It is a process. A dance between accepting things as they are and doing something about them.
There is another story of a man who was a psychiatrist and neurologist. He had a loving wife and children. They were forcibly separated from each other, his wife and children killed. While he remained a prisoner to the unknown, and to the Nazis. I have no doubt that the mess he found himself in was not his fault, and yet he found himself there anyway. He took it upon himself to find meaning in his suffering, and eventually turned his mess into a garden that flourished. That man was Viktor Frankl
A more recent story involves a boy born to a poor family in Africa, he took it upon himself to build a windmill to help supply his village with electricity. You can watch him speak at one of the TED conferences here.
All of these people have something in common. They are extraordinary thinkers. They all ended up with a problem that was not of their own making and found a way to make the best of it.
We are all born into some kind of mess for which we are not responsible, and if we want something different, we must become responsible for making that happen.
Lexi
Accepting now as a starting point, we do one of three things,
(a) We think “Joy, this is all worth it!”
(b) We think “This sucks, it’s not worth it,” then we kill ourselves, or
(c) We realize that we really don’t know if it’s all worth it or not, and who knows what we do from that point. We might stop and re-evaluate later in life…
Deciding the glass is half full is just as delusional as an over-focus on the negatives of the past. We do have to live in reality, and it may not be pretty in some cases. It may be so bad that suicide is our best option. Avoiding all recognition of this option means possibly accepting a more negative outcome.
Also, I find Oprah’s life repulsive. She’s wealthy, but she’s a lonely cult leader that I find unscrupulous at best. If she’s an example of “Look, you can choose to be dishonest and succeed instead of mope,” then I’m not sure that makes this world look any more attractive to somebody at point (c).
I think you’re abusing statistics when you focus on success stories, as if there was no chance at all involved. Some people simply lose even the opportunities they seem to have. Take a bunch of miserable abused children, and some of them will hit the positive tail as time goes on, regardless of their personal perspectives, which you never really link to the positive outcomes anywhere in this article (so what’s the point of being an optimist?).
I recognize what you’re trying to do. You want people to take control of their fortunes. But it’s not entirely clear that’s possible. It’s not clear that every decision isn’t a roll of the dice that we can lose disproportionately (or win disproportionately). Even the best poker players in the world often admit there might be better players out there who simply didn’t have the good runs that they had when starting out. Life is like that — there’s a lot of chance involved, regardless of whether we look at the glass as half full or half empty, or as an overly simplistic model of life.
100% agreed. That is one of my primary beliefs: life is what you make of it. If you choose to deal with your situations, you can improve them or make your life better. If you choose to not deal with them (through inaction even) then you will never go anywhere!
Same sort of thing with deciding to change yourself in any way: weight loss, boosting self confidence, etc. Those are willpower things. You decide you want it to happen, you stick to it and make it happen.
love it.
I find being pragmatic helps. For the small situations, to sit around and go, “damnit, this is so unfair, it would be so much less complicated if THAT hadn’t happened” doesn’t actually change a situation. So, you have to work with what you’ve got. And, in a larger life sense, you can do that too. It’s just a lot more effort!
*daily trying to work on my personal gripe of, “if only everyone could be more organized”*
Infopractical–
I tend to agree with you that always looking at the glass half-full does not mean things will change. Optimism may help keep a person in a messy harmful situation and it may help a person get to the other side of a difficult situation, depending on where the optimism is aimed.
Looking for a pony in a pile of mess is one thing people can do. Making fertilizer and getting some seeds and growing a vegetable garden is another.
For me, I don’t actually know how Oprah’s dishonest. Lonely seems likely, and I would wager that has to do with some more mess that she needs to clean up if she wants that to be different.
I also tend to think there are many indicators for success, money is one of them, happiness is another, relationship yet a third, simply being a live, yet another.
You’re right I don’t think I clearly linked personal perspectives and positive outcomes. I think our perception of our efficacy/purpose in a crummy situation affects how well we get through that crummy situation– both in terms of getting to the other side, and in terms of not letting it affect us as deeply as it could. Our perceptions can lead us to paralization or mobilization, or lashing/acting out in any given situation.
Often we learn how to perceive ourselves in childhood, which is why parents are very important to kids early on, peers, later. If we have a parent who is always belittling us (or themselves) it lends a heavy burden to our own self-perception. I think we can change that perception- not overnight, but via concerted effort. In changing that perception we are able to act from a healthier way, rather than freezing or lashing/acting out.
I don’t think we’re meant to feel elation and glee all the time– feeling sad is a natural normal part of the human experience and pushing it away contributes more to the acting out piece.
I know it is not possible to change events or other people, but it is possible to change/influence ourselves.
As for negative examples? The Menendez Brothers come to mind. They were born to at least middle class parents, possible abused, murdered their parents and went on a spending spree. There are also the kids that are so badly damaged as children than they end up spending their lives in government paid living situations. And likely, they cannot take control of their own fortunes.
Then there are the people that seem to like walking around in a mess and are creating a mess for others– OJ Simpson, Michael Vick, Charles Keating. And we may not always be able to foolproof ourselves against those people.
To take my own advice, one of the “messes” I was born into was distorted self-image. My mother who was about 5′6″ and a buck ten was constantly asking if she was fat– distorting my sisters and my perception of what war normal, and later quizzing my sister on her food and calling her Miss piggy and commenting on me as well (I was almost sickly thin as a kid, but it was naturally how I was). This has had an unfortunate impact on my sense of self and perception of self– which I can choose to continue to let bother me, or I can choose to do something about. Will it go away forever? Probably not, that is the misfortune of learning the habit of thinking that way early in childhood. But can I get to a point where I can live with it and not let it paralyze me? You bet.
I tend to think of D) some of it is worth it, some of it is not, some of what is I can improve upon and grow, some of what is not I can improve upon and grow, and some of what is not, I can’t do anything about. But I’m going to be damn sure that I improve the things I can. In addition, I am curious about what happens next.
Yes, random things do happen in life — that dice is being rolled by all of us. Yes, all sorts of people will be born into situations so horrific or hopeless that there is nothing that they can do to become a “success” by some definitions.
Regardless of that, I also absolutely believe that how you relate to your situation can change it, that we have an active hand in changing our own reality. Just thinking happy shiny thoughts won’t do it of course, it requires that you put effort into it, to put energy into the direction you want to go.
There are a lot of variables — one’s starting point, physical resources, emotional resources, intellectual resources; the lottery of the genetics and environment and society. But there is a lot one person can do, given just a glimmer of hope or an ounce of will, that can take a horrible situation and leverage it open to a better one.
I want to write endlessly on this, but it all gets far to complex with too many side paths to really be reasonable for a blog comment.