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Originally Posted by missing  you might. Or you might find a rescue boat. Most likely however, you will drown as the human body is not meant to float at sea forever. Talk about giving yourself away to the circumstances! |
No one said anything about avoiding risk. There are many people who will take a plunge into the ocean over swimming up stream for the rest of their lives.
An obvious example would be someone who is oppressed in his own country and decides to escape to another. That is a venture that is more likely to lead to misery than to happiness, and still people do it.
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Maybe, maybe not but some certainly have an easier time of it than others. Two people can put in the SAME EXACT amount of effort and take the same amount of responsibility. Yet one person can be a millionaire and the other might barely scrape by. Even if not rigged, the system certainly favored the millionaire.
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The chances of those two people having the exact same circumstances to start with are beyond nihil, so you can hardly expect that one can duplicate the success of the other by doing exactly the same.
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The problem is that by definition, a successful person can't know what it's like to be a life-long failure.
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No one who lives can know what it is like to be a life long failure, because one would have to be dead before that conclusion can be drawn about someone's life.
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In fact, if you are a victim I'd say it's your responsibility to acknowledge it, so you can respond appropriately.
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Yes! That's my whole point!
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If you are going to define taking responsibility "accepting reality for what it is", than I agree with you.
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Accepting reality for what it is, is just one responsible reaction to one's circumstance.
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When I talk about "pr" as a religion I'm referring to people who make blanket judgments about everyone they see without considering the variables. They might see a bum and a millionaire and automatically assume that the millionaire is responsible, the bum not. But in reality the millionaire may have inherited their money while the bum is a vet who lost mental functioning in a war.
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One of the problems with our little discussion here is that you equate success to money and I equate success to life. In my world, the millionaire can be the loser for leading a financially abundant but otherwise unfulfilled life, while the bum may be the winner, happy to be exactly who and where he is.
I also don't think that the people who make those blanket statements are big on personal responsibility - they just sound like they are.
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If somebody really is "playing victim", make sure they really are before you write them off as a loser.
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Agreed.
For the record, the people who I would call losers would be the kind of folk who live off social security, while being perfectly capable of doing some work or volunteering and then spend their lives complaining about how all the foreigners drive a nicer car then they do. It is a paring of the least amount of problems with the loudest complaints. A complete and utter lack of any sense of one's responsibility in life.
(Fortunately, these people are but a minority)