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After, say, 50, or in retirement, does it make sense to consider yourself and others winners or losers in life?
Question bothers me.
What is a loser, anyway? Someone who has never done anything much?
Drug addict? Or someone, like myself, who has not achieved their life goals and expectations
Such as marriage, or admirable LTR, career job satisfaction? I have not achieved that, having failed to get really good well paying jobs--- and love. Only lost love.
Some say loners and weirdos are losers (unfairly) and some
say if you lost all your money, bankrupt. Not to mention criminal types.
What makes you a winner? Big success, nice family?
This is bound and determined by culture because western values differ from the poorest nations.
Age doesn't matter. Diners--and that specifically includes women who, unbelievably enough, still expect men to pay for them--should always pay his or her portion of the check.
After, say, 50, or in retirement, does it make sense to consider yourself and others winners or losers in life?
Question bothers me.... What you think?
You have gotten a lot of negative feedback, and much of it is aimed at the terms "winner" and "loser." I would guess that many of these people objecting are into the latter part of their lives. (In a number of cases this is knowledge derived from their posting history.)
My own attitude (age 82) is that those terms are not meaningful to me, i.e. I would have difficulty in describing where I am at and how I feel about it in those terms. I have a very small number of friends who are sixty or more, some are Europeans and some are Americans or Canadians. None ever use these terms.
I certainly hear and read them used younger people twenties through forties. I would think that this might be due to the prevalence of sports and games in their lives; and, thus, these terms get extended into evaluating their personal lives. This win/lose orientation seems pretty deep in our culture. I wonder if these young people will carry this on through the rest of their lives.
I have to say that there are a few people whom I do describe in these terms, and they are all young people. What "losers" have in common is that they are all chronically self-destructive, whereas those I think of as "winners" have made a strong and focused effort to escape a bad family or social environment. But I don't think of the great bulk of younger people in these terms.
I am aware of some men close to my end of the age scale who very obviously are keeping score about their lives, and they tend to parade their winning plays out for public consumption at coffee or dinner, though I haven't heard the specific winner/loser terminology. My mother kept score about how she was doing in life, and beginning in her sixties really racked up points and was finally happy about her score. In the case of the men I mention, and my mother, is that they seem unaware that they are judged to be horses asses by their audience for the very reason that they are constantly showing their score cards. But maybe if you don't know that other people don't agree with your public score-keeping it doesn't matter.
I was brought up with the idea of score-keeping as a major activity in life, maybe that was the spirit of the era of my childhood/youth - especially the 50's part of it. My father judged me a loser at the beginning of Jr. high, there was a revised decision for four years - I had a hot girlfriend who gave him as much lip as he tried to give her (mucho points for snagging her), and then the final negative judgment in my 20's, which he announced I would see reflected in his will. It was. But he was dead, I was alive and that considerably softened being a loser. My mother had arrived at the same judgement in my twenties. She did not die as conveniently, and was thus considerably more difficult to ignore.
I accepted the loser judgement as mine. On the whole I didn't seem to deal with my friends or co-workers in terms of winners/loser I don't think. (Maybe since I accepted "loser" I was too humble to do it OK, probably not.)
At age forty the whole idea of me being a loser or winner, or that many people had a score card I cared about went bye-bye almost as fast as flushing a toilet. There were strong influences which impelled this, but in the end it was the change itself that mattered. The events that impelled the change are long gone, along with many other big events since then - good and lousy; but the understanding that win/lose is not the way the world works remains.
There is a third leg. Health, money and love. Any two will make up for a shortfall in the third.
I’d like to think that we have all three. I don’t consider us to be “winners” but rather “extremely fortunate”. We’re youngsters (62 & 56) compared to some here so the final chapters are a long ways from being written.
In your spare time go walk around one of the old Town cemeteries. You'll see graves of children 2-3 year old and many people who have died even younger than your current age.
Always makes me feel like a winner.
An even more relevant comparison for me is when I look at friends I knew when I was younger who have died. One recently died of lung cancer who is the same age I was. Her last two years were difficult not only from the standpoint of disease, but inability to work much. Another friend died a few years ago at age 59 of kidney cancer. Unfortunately, I could go on and on. I know quite a number of people who died before they should have. It was George Bernard Shaw who said that "getting old wasn't bad when you consider the alternatives."
One can see one's self as a winner I suppose. I just see myself as more fortunate. Good habits can help though. I do not understand those who smoke cigarettes. Nor, do I relate much to addiction generally. I've just never been addicted to anything and I don't relate to it.
We're winners to have been born at all, then to be able to read and write, now having computers to write with, and so much more!
That's quite a statement in blue - if you had never been born you would have no idea what you've missed by not living in the world nor would you even know that a world exists!
Your statement implies that you would have had a consciousness if you had never been born - a consciousness that would tell you what you have missed by not living.
Last edited by matisse12; 11-21-2019 at 09:11 PM..
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OK, probably not.)
