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Generally I believe it is true, OP. The thing I'd like to add is that a person has to create his own meaning of adversity and success and not to allow the judgement of others to be his measure.
If you are looking for material results you'll miss the point. Because it's what we believe that makes the difference between satisfaction and feelings of failure.
True satisfaction with one's life comes from within not from without.
I like the idea that everyone needs occasional relief from the stress and believe in building into your life a system of rewards for each goal gained. It might be as insignificant as checking out a library book you'd wanted to read if you don't have money. But you can still create little rewards along the way if you feel you aren't getting them from the outer world.
I've learned that sometimes it takes the long view to see the results of your efforts and others might never see them at all. But what counts is how you feel about yourself.
Both my forties and my sixties were circumstantially miserable. But I had wise friends who taught me to look upon each adversity as a challenge and an opportunity to learn new coping skills. That approach helps quite a bit. Makes the struggle less personal and considers the possibility that something new and good can come from the changes.
It's a whole different approach to hard times. And my friends were right. I learned how to deal with things
I would have never dreamed I could have if I had felt defeated approaching them.
But you can't learn this with blind faith. You have to take the risk of walking through it to find out it's true. Nothing may happen circumstantially but the changes that happen in your beliefs about yourself and your thoughts will change and that is the change that makes the difference.
It takes a lifetime to build a sturdy human. Smiling.
Motivational speakers like tropes like this, but it's actually not true. There is nothing inherently ennobling about suffering, and nothing automatically degrading or corrupting about enjoying life.
What motivates people is the actual opportunity to better themselves, and the ability to have a healthy separation between work life and personal life. A lot of how work is structured in this country is designed to make leisure artificially scarce. In the rest of the West, people start with at least 4 weeks/yr of vacation and progress typically to 6 weeks. Entire countries largely shut down for the month of August. Some of them have shorter than 40 hour work weeks. Here, we nurse the fiction that this is lazy an indolent and slovenly and despicable. You won't see things like you typically see in Europe, people taking long lunches in lovely city parks, reading books, for example. People are afraid not to wolf down a cold sandwich at their desk, lest they be seen as Not A Team Player.
During those tornadoes in Kentucky and southern Illinois a little bit ago, workers died in an Amazon warehouse and a candle factory where they were forbidden to stop working just because of a silly tornado warning siren.
Ask those people if suffering is a virtue!
Amen to that. I am currently doing a stint in accounting the amount of people "sad bragging" about the 10-12 hour days they are putting in is completely offputting. It's made me change my opinion on working in this field, and particularly for a large, publicly traded company. Pre-closes and closes are absolutely brutal in this line of work. I'm at lunch watching an array of tables where people are hunkered over their work laptops while wolfing down some food. It's pitiful. The worst part of this is that they do not provide any sort of flexibility like WFH, because according to the C-level, "who wants that?".
It's sad and it's pathetic, and I absolutely detest this culture.
The point is you have the wherewithal to understand what will give your daughter the best opportunities in life. Maybe that's a better tutor, a better school, mentorship through college, and giving her a leg up on how the world out there works. My parents either didn't do these things or they didn't execute it very well. There are millions of children who have parents like mine, who don't know any better than what they know. It took me at least 10-15 years of living out on my own to realize a lot about the world and myself. Another way of putting it is that my parents didn't feed the curiosity; thus, it was squandered in my youth.
It's not that this prevented me from success later on, I'm not saying that at all. I feel like I've accomplished quite a bit, as a matter of fact. What I am saying is that it set me back quite a bit, that it took me until my mid 30s to really get a grasp on what it was I am good and and what I want to be and how that fits in the world at large. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos probably already knew a lot about those things by the time they were in their late teens.
People don't like it when adult children blame their parents. I do place some blame with them. While it is true we make our own beds as adults, I do believe that parents make their children's beds. I don't really feed my daughter's curiosity. The only thing I really do is make her aware that her words and behavior have meaning. It was a pain dragging her to extra-curricular activities so I stopped signing her up. I know some parents ignore this because they probably think the child will be happy they stuck with it in the end. That doesn't always work out for all people though.
A relative of mine was supported in his particular interest and now he regrets spending so many years in that area. He wishes he was talked out of it, but he was allowed to have tantrums when he didn't get his way. I think parents are often put between a rock and a hard place when it comes to their children.
Adversity might be too strong of a word when what many people are feeling is a lack of promotion from friends, relatives, co-workers, and employers.
People don't like it when adult children blame their parents. I do place some blame with them. While it is true we make our own beds as adults, I do believe that parents make their children's beds. I don't really feed my daughter's curiosity. The only thing I really do is make her aware that her words and behavior have meaning. It was a pain dragging her to extra-curricular activities so I stopped signing her up. I know some parents ignore this because they probably think the child will be happy they stuck with it in the end. That doesn't always work out for all people though.
A relative of mine was supported in his particular interest and now he regrets spending so many years in that area. He wishes he was talked out of it, but he was allowed to have tantrums when he didn't get his way. I think parents are often put between a rock and a hard place when it comes to their children.
Adversity might be too strong of a word when what many people are feeling is a lack of promotion from friends, relatives, co-workers, and employers.
Those people probably don't like any idea that suggests that maybe they failed a little bit.
If anyone thinks that for a second that parents aren't, in large part, responsible for the outcomes and future trajectory of their children, then clearly those people have no clue what comes of early childhood development or the lack thereof.
If anyone thinks that for a second that parents aren't, in large part, responsible for the outcomes and future trajectory of their children, then clearly those people have no clue what comes of early childhood development or the lack thereof.
To my mind, being a parent is a bit like being a doctor. The operative principle is "first, do no harm".
I know people well whose parents were very harmful, and were diminished / damaged by it and if they grew up to do well in adult life, it involved way more effort than most people have to put in to work on themselves. An order or two of magnitude more.
That said, my personal belief is that nature trumps nurture in most cases. I know too many wonderful parents whose children were almost literally demon seed, and too many wonderful people who emerged unscathed from indifferent or poor parenting, for nature not to be a powerful factor in these things.
Elder abuse from children is another thing to consider. I have seen some examples of that, too, and I am quite certain that whatever imperfections the victims had, it didn't come close to justifying the perpetrators. In fact, being evil is an inappropriate response to virtually anything, when it comes down to it.
Get the right combination of events, environment and people darn right there are demon seeds especially if one is selfish or narcissistic After a certain point though 'the adult' is supposed to learn how to survive and adapt or behave in life/society in general. Intoxication or avoiding the uncomfortable let alone tough things in life enables a demon seed. Learning is a life long process.
Last edited by anononcty; 02-13-2022 at 05:04 PM..
Those people probably don't like any idea that suggests that maybe they failed a little bit.
If anyone thinks that for a second that parents aren't, in large part, responsible for the outcomes and future trajectory of their children, then clearly those people have no clue what comes of early childhood development or the lack thereof.
Yes. I agree.
And just to clarify, when I say I don't feed my daughter's curiosity, what I mean is that I won't break my bank paying for online gaming. LOL. But for general curiosity, my only expectation is for her to have fun and be safe while trying new things, because some things do require skills that she may not be aware of.
It's just another pat generalization, easily disproved with actual examples of people who didn't thrive at all under adversity and others whose comfort allowed them the freedom to excel because their lives weren't spent just surviving.
Regarding blaming one's parents for their adult struggles....
I can most definitely do a lot of processing and contemplate things about who I am, including some that are unhelpful, and parts of my life trajectory that could have been different, and see where my parents contributed negatively to this and that...but I also realize that they did not have a crystal ball. They did not plan it. They did not intend me harm. And I haven't met many parents at all who actually had intent to cause their children lifelong harm. Mostly, they think they're doing good, they are, as I often say, "doing the best they can with the tools they have." Maybe their toolbox is just really limited.
But more to the point, somewhere during my teen years, I did not WANT anyone else to take any kind of blame for anything I was doing. My autonomy became really important to me. For some reason, especially when I was making choices that others would judge negatively. If there were consequences, I would deal with them. Myself. And along with that thinking, blame is counter productive.
I know a lot of people who feel like, if they don't blame someone else, they must then blame and judge themselves, and beat themselves up over something. I don't do that either. I just don't have a lot of use for blame or shame...but taking RESPONSIBILITY instead, is very empowering. When you blame someone else to relieve yourself of bad feelings or a sense of responsibility, you throw away your own power. Thinking that there was nothing I could have done differently in a situation does not make me feel better. It makes me feel helpless. I don't want to feel that way. I like feeling as though I've got some control over my life.
OK, so I'm real enough to know that a lot of the time, it's all chaos and we don't have control. But this mindset has helped me to cope and overcome challenges. I don't bother punishing myself over anything, I just try to learn what I can and move on.
And I decided that part of my growing up and accepting my own adulthood, was forgiving my parents. It doesn't mean that I say that things they did that were not OK, were OK. It just means accepting that they are human and flawed, just like I am.
What really sucks is that I've spend a really stoopid amount of time meandering around in my own head, and there's a lot of stuff, like negative feelings and bad self talk, really unhelpful programming in there, that I've been able to see, identify, and understand...but I never could work out how to get rid of it. My brain doesn't seem to come with an "uninstall" feature. The best I've been able to do is just to accept it, and then get on with things anyways.
No, I do not agree with the title statement, as a blanket rule.
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