I've managed to make myself fairly conventionally attractive, physically. I still have no self-esteem but maintaining my appearance has made life WAY easier so it's an enormous accomplishment for me. I don't think I'd have accomplished much of what I have if people hadn't extended completely unwarranted generosity towards me based on superficial factors.

I'm happy to just keep working within my profession and personally to address and prevent environmental degradation. Not a lofty goal but ultimately I'll be dead anyways.

I must admit I find the topic of this thread strange.

I was born lucky, most of the luck has been on the positive side of the ledger. At least to date. But I suspect I will go out pretty close to even in terms of luck. But along the way I may have dissipated more than my fair share of energy. Is that an accomplishment?

Any morning you wake up breathing is an accomplishment.

laklak wrote:Any morning you wake up breathing is an accomplishment.

And you said you didn't have any wisdom!!


I was thinking about this and other stuff on the way home last night.

A lot of English proverbs are two-part and speakers often omit the second part in speaking.
One might say 'Too many cooks...' or ' People in glass houses...' and the other person has to mentally fill in the missing part.

I wondered whether the formulaic utterance 'You live and learn' is actually the first part of a pair, the second part being..
'and then you die and forget it all.'

Knowing that second part is the getting of wisdom perhaps...

romansh wrote:I must admit I find the topic of this thread strange.

I was born lucky, most of the luck has been on the positive side of the ledger. At least to date. But I suspect I will go out pretty close to even in terms of luck. But along the way I may have dissipated more than my fair share of energy. Is that an accomplishment?

Yes, in my previous post I made light of this topic because accomplishments and failures are more down to luck - or more precisely the accident where you are born, when and in what social stratum and how you were raised - than personal effort. here's my own good luck story, originally posted at Rationalia not quite four years ago:

Born to parents with a solid middle class background in an affluent European nation I got a head start right out of the starting block. My advantage was compounded by the fact that although both my parents were practicing Catholics, they were of very much members of its most liberal strand. They were enthusiastically supporting us children with any means to learn things, and gave us whatever they could think of in order to make that easier. But wait, there's more. They did not tell us what to learn, nor did they try to tell us what to think. No, none of that. They were content with encouraging us to do our own thinking with no more than the occasional, encouraging suggestion.

It's no wonder that I had a largely happy life. This was further assisted by a few events that seemed insignificant at the time, yet proved to lead to some extraordinary strokes of luck later on. One was our migration to Australia. As children we perceived this as no more than just another exciting adventure rather than an event that is bound to have massively life changing consequences. Oh, and did we love the new home. No more excruciating pressure to wear suits to even just go to a concert. No more grey, drizzling skies for week after week. "Guten Tag, Herr Schneider" was replaced with "Hi Baz, howrya doin, mate?"

School was a bit of a downer for me in comparison to Germany, but even there I was extraordinary lucky with one seemingly innocuous decision I made, which had huge repercussions a few years later. On my first visit there some form masters and the headmaster assessed me in order to slot me into the appropriate class. My English was no better than was expected by two or three years of studying it as a second language, but it was decided that this was not a significant hurdle. Then one of the teachers got me to have a look at a maths textbook. I opened it randomly and saw notations I was not familiar with, but I could make out that the chapter was about quadratic equations. I told the teacher what I saw. The consensus was: "Right, fourth form it is for you, young man." I was not so sure. Out of sheer laziness I had already failed Maths once, and because I had failed Latin for the same reason as well, I had to repeat the entire year. I leafed around in the maths book some more, and decided I'd rather not rush things, and told the teacher that I was not confident I could cope with fourth form maths. After a brief discussion they said "OK then. It's third form for you then."

Of course this meant I'd finish secondary school a year later than my teacher initially had planned for me, and that was the stroke of luck. Australia still had conscription at the time. Every year a modified machine of the old fashioned mechanical lotto thingie was loaded up with one numbered marble for each day of the year. One by one it delivered half of them into a tray. All males over 18 who had finished school by then and whose birthday matched with that on one of the marbles was up for conscription. Thousands of conscripts were rotated for a tour of duty in the Vietnam.

The conscription was televised. To my horror my number came up. While I loved my new country I still had more than enough German conditioning in me to know that I could not refuse this order and with great trepidation awaited the letter advising me of my appointment with a military doctor for the medical, undoubtedly passing it and spending two years of my life in hell with the added jeopardy of some time being shot at for real with live bullets and the prospect of being blown to bits.

Before the letter arrived the incumbent government lost the general election and the new Prime Minister wasted no time making good his promise to abolish conscription. Before the day after he was sworn in had ended he signed conscription out of existence and ordered all Australian troops out of Vietnam. That day I wondered how I'd be if I had finished school one year earlier and my marble had been drawn in the conscription lotto.

Almost simultaneously another one of the new government's afforded me immense luck. The Labor Party was of the view that education was the nation's investment in its future and that therefore not just primary and secondary education should be made available to those who did not have the funds to finance it themselves, but tertiary education as well. University studies became tax payer funded with the enactment of one parliamentary bill. Students were even entitled to an allowance. Though not sufficient to actually live on that, it went a long way towards it. The only remaining costs of being a student were the annual registration fee, text books and transport costs. Well, and drugs and booze too, but I decided to not be greedy.

Instead I wondered what would have happened had I finished secondary school a year earlier. To begin with, I would have had to not been conscripted, but even if I had it would have been extremely unlikely that I would have qualified. As it was my school results enabled me to be accepted for my first choice by the narrowest of margins. I know this because I was not included in the first round of acceptances. My first choice was not everybody else's first choice, and those candidates for whom it was their second, third or fourth preference naturally went for the options they really preferred. Hence a second round of acceptances, and I got in on that one. Had I finished secondary school a year earlier my exam results would have been lower and I would not have qualified for admission at all. Third and fourth rounds consisted of only a minute number of extra opportunities. Of course I had no inkling of the reverberations caused by my pretty much on the spot decision to start school in Australia in third rather than fourth form in order to give myself a better chance of learning stuff more thoroughly.

I lumbered on rather carelessly ever since, aided by more good luck, and here I am. So, what's so fucked up about that, you might ask? Well, on Wednesday I will be 62, and since I have been a heavy smoker for most of my life and an immoderate drinker for a big chunk of it, I don't expect to reach the statistical average of the life expectancy of a male in an affluent western style democracy, so my life will expire all too soon. Bits of my body have started to malfunction already. Bad back, bursitis, tinnitus, weak knees and gout, are among the conditions that can only be managed, not got rid of. ageing is a tragedy. So, yeah, the prospect of the final curtain call getting rather near is really, really fucked for reals.

The reason I prattled on like this is to rattle your cages. Your achievements are more the result of the environment surrounding you than your personal striving. Your life goals are similarly determined.

Your environment is the single most important thing in shaping who you become
Because even if you reject it it still influences your life choices and who you are
It is more important than having a positive mental attitude as not everyone does

One makes choices. Or perhaps rather one is responsible for such choices.

tuco wrote:One makes choices.

Of course one does … but the wisdom of the choice is down to luck, good education, right temperament, right place, right time, right ethnic background, I could go on.

We are not self made people relieving god of an almighty responsibility.

Or perhaps rather one is responsible for such choices.

We bear the consequences of our choices ... there is a difference.

Of course, you could. It's comforting to attribute it to luck. Whether it's close to reality or not is another question.

Hermit wrote:

romansh wrote:I must admit I find the topic of this thread strange.

I was born lucky, most of the luck has been on the positive side of the ledger. At least to date. But I suspect I will go out pretty close to even in terms of luck. But along the way I may have dissipated more than my fair share of energy. Is that an accomplishment?

Yes, in my previous post I made light of this topic because accomplishments and failures are more down to luck - or more precisely the accident where you are born, when and in what social stratum and how you were raised - than personal effort. here's my own good luck story, originally posted at Rationalia not quite four years ago:

Born to parents with a solid middle class background in an affluent European nation ...

Thanks Hermit.

The sad part all this is in a sense a lie, not an act of commission, but an inevitable omission. There are a myriad of influences that have nudged you (and me) subliminally in one direction or another. But I do take your point.

romansh wrote:The sad part all this is in a sense a lie, not an act of commission, but an inevitable omission.

I leave the idea that we are autonomous units responsible for our commissions and omissions to the primitives. No, I won't be drawn into a discussion regarding free will. The first exercise inflicted on me at SU concerned free will. By the time I handed it in I saw the futility of debating it. That was 40 years ago, give or take. LOL @ the nine year old thread on the topic, now north of the 13,000 post mark. I iz immunised.

Lucky you ;)

It's still a baby compared to what was on the old rdf forum.

romansh wrote:It's still a baby compared to what was on the old rdf forum.

There were 80 threads concerning free will, and that's not counting the ones that focused specifically on compatibilism and Dan Dennett. For some technical reason threads were locked at the 1000 post mark. Discussion was resumed in newly created ones.

I used to read those threads, tho never participated in RDF. Not because I would be interested whether free will exists or not but because there was some interesting info about related issues, brain, neural networks, thought experiments, etc.

Hermit wrote:Yes, in my previous post I made light of this topic because accomplishments and failures are more down to luck - or more precisely the accident where you are born, when and in what social stratum and how you were raised - than personal effort.

I would modify this and your previous post as well: most societally recognized accomplishments.

Obviously, personal accomplishments are subjective and potentially decoupled from anything to do with upbringing, whether privileged or not.

However, societally recognized accomplishments do often note, or are often noteworthy when they are not born of privilege.

I dunno what my accomplishments are. Still being alive is one, I suppose. Still being somewhat functional? Being the only member of my family with a university education? Not being as poor as I started out? Being a mother? Finding a lovely person to be with? There’s nothing spectacular there. I’ll live until I don’t, and try not to stress too much about how soon that will be.

That's a curse, not an accomplishment. I'm a partially reformed Grammar Nazi from back in the pre-spell check days.
One can never be a fully reformed Grammar Nazi.