Don't worry wincel I know what you mean. There is a difference from being raised good, and just having good intentions from the heart. What you said does make sense but it also can go the other way and make the person psychotic. It is all about how that person ultimately diffuses the hardships that he/she went through. And that said person who went through the hardship now only wants positive things to happen, because they know what the other spectrum of that is like. They just are all around down to earth, easy going, and just want to make people feel good. Being raised good is different, meaning your parents always taught you what the good choice is to make when you have to choose, and not belittle people, be kind etc. But when you go through that said hardship you are talking about, YOU NOW CHOOSE to be good, instead of being raised good because you might not even want to make that choice to be good.

It's going to vary with someone's personality. I have family and friends who've been alot - poverty, military, gang life, hard labor - and they're pretty blunt with how they talk to people. They have a "Pull yourself up by your boot straps" mentality and lack empathy.

People should seek to be well-rounded. Because good people can be taken advantage of. So be good, wise, fearless, insightful, experienced, etc.

How can you be accepting of others strife if you admit you are losing empathy for humans???

Logic not even once

Or are you saying you haven't suffered?

Lol.

Simple as that, folks.

You can only be a good person if really bad chit happened to you.

gl hf everyone.

Maybe suffering is necessary but not sufficient. As I said, if you suffer too much, you may end up breaking as a person. But if you never suffer at all, you will end up rotten and spoiled.

Have you suffered too much?

idk

anyway it's not about me

nothing ITT is about me and that entire line of argument is just ad hominem

Well suffering is a pretty strong term.

Let's just accept the truth ok...to be a generally good person you need a "good" upbringing, life experience, and responsibility.

So we are pretty much between the last 2

Why are you being so defensive brah? Just wondering if you're gonna go supreme as you have little empathy left and disdain for humans

I had a pretty ****ty childhood...I didn’t turn it in to a situation where I fought it and excelled in life...I dropped out of school before I finished 9th grade, kinda ****ed off for a while too. There’s parts of me that think that it’s unfair but I’m also happy with how it shaped me as a person. There’s always things I need to be working on because life/living doesn’t come easy to me but I’d rather that then just floating through life, not caring.

I don’t necessarily agree that rich people are bad and poor people are good because I’ve seen first hand some ****ty *******s that had horrible lives and wonderful people that did have it easy.

It is what it is.

Nah it comes down to many factors, some people are just dumb and don't realize they do bad stuff but then they may learn

Some people just don't give af, they're high on life and think they're better than everyone

Some people have been tortured, so they want to take it out on others

Some people have personality disorders, where they know they're doing bad stuff, but get off to it anyway

Pretty much this.

OP there are no blanket, black-and-white rules on what makes a person good or bad. You are intensely oversimplifying the matter.

Have you ever heard of the 4th turning/ Strauss Howe generational theories ?

If you look at past dictators and cruel, tyrannical leaders, many of them came from humble if not underprivileged backgrounds and they turned out to be some of the worst people in human history. (ex. Hitler, Stalin etc)

At the same time you have leaders who came from humble and underprivileged backgrounds and they turned out to be influential and had a deep impact on society. (Gandhi, Martin Luther King etc).

I don't think suffering is the right way to look at it because suffering is relative, and humans adapt to the circumstances around them.

I remember reading in "How To Make Friends and Influence People" (should be required reading for incels) about the 1930s brah author coming across a bunch of polio kids on recess outside of an institution in crutches and wheelchairs, and it was all smiles and jokes between them. So the author had to ask their teacher "don't these kids feelbadabout being crippled? Most of them remember a time when they could walk, and that's all been taken from them." The teacher said they struggle to deal with it at first, but once they kind of accept that it's their lot, they're not any less happy than ordinary kids."

So I wouldn't say it's suffering that makes you happy or not (brah, you on dat Beast time from Split?). You can and will adapt to pretty much any circumstances in your life, for good or ill. BRB living in a favela? You get used to it. BRB paralyzed from the waist down? You get used to it. BRB rock star and drive 3 different Ferraris a week? You get used to it. BRB spoiled upper class American kid? You get used to it. It's not about the level of comfort or suffering itself.

I'm going to kinda go on dat Buddhist time and say comparison is the death of joy. It's not your material circumstances that make you miserable, it's your expectations. BRB upper middle class HS girl has everything she ever wanted handed to her, but goes maximum first world problems and gets pissed because Penny and Jenny got into Vanderbilt and she's stuck at State U. Never mind she's getting a free education better than 99.9% of the planet paid for in full by her parents, it's that comparison to others that makes her feel inferior and miserable. The going to school free thing is just taken for granted ("you get used to it"). BRB Bernie fukkin Madoff had like $50 billion after founding the ****ing NASDAQ, and he went and stole billions from friends, family, and charities to get even more. It was never about the money, it was the billionaire version of keeping up with the Joneses. He had to beat his peers on the Fortune 500 scorecard, he didn't care who he had to step on to do it, and those billions he already had were just background noise.

So the best approach is to appreciate what you have, and thatisone perspective that suffering can give you, but it's hard because basicallyanythingwill fade into the background over enough time and become the "new normal" that you take for granted. Even if you've suffered to get somewhere, over time you can eventually lose that perspective. Look at all the people in Hollywood who started from nothing and turned into self-important douchebags - over time that Hollywood/Malibu life just becomes the new normal. All you can do is try to stay mindful of it.

IMO, the real keys to happiness are to have something to work for - why do you get out of bed every day - and a community around you.

good post

minor nitpick...bernie madoff didn't found nasdaq...he was once a chairman though

I can confirm everything OP has said

I was born in Russia but between age of 6-12 i basically grew up in the ghettos of Israel where 8 year old roam the streets in gangs throwing rocks at other kids,
if you walk alone you can get rushed by 10 kids who beat you up just for the fun of it or do cruel things like wrap you around in tape and shove a stick up your ass just for the lolz or spray paint your face and piss on you. it was a real dog eat dog world when my parents moved us to North america at age 12 we were pretty poor and i havent gotten anything from my parents as far as money goes and come home to a dinner of kraft dinner and a bag of chips the cheap kind
my parents were clueless about diet so most of my childhood it was chicken legs bought on sale and a potato then chips and candy as those things are cheap and my parents figured it was cheaper to buy chips and candy than real food

long story short the struggle was real but now as an adult im self made millionaire so i think it was all worth it

and kids growing up today not knowing what a struggle life is when you are poor are doomed to fail

ps: im 30 (didnt edit my misc account)

what does troll patrol mean ? r u the troll or do u not like trolls and stop them ?

asking for a friend

I agree with your message to an extent OP. Some aren't strong enough to go through suffering and come out stronger. Many who go through trauma are wounded individuals who lack in confidence. On the other side, you've got the ones who deal with trauma in a more productive way and come out stronger.

One thing that pisses me off more than anything is people who blame the past for who they are now. I get it, you were bullied, your parents treated you wrong, your dog died, etc. Yes, thats sad but if you let that define you and hold you back then you're never going to become anything of value. I feel so strongly about it because I see people who could have potential just let themselves rot because they "have a bad past". Suck it up and move forward.

I lost my dad when I was 9, my papa Ray 2 weeks later, my uncle Harvey at 14, my swim coach (who was basically a dad to me after my dad died) at 17, one of my best friends at 18, and my papa Richard less than a year ago. If there's ever been a father figure for me, I lost him. I was a hermit after I lost my dad and got super fat in middle school. Everyone called me titty boy and even teachers laughed at times. Got beat up multiple times from 12-18. I had family who would belittle and berate me for not only my weight but for other things. I had terrible social anxiety. List goes on and on.

What did I do? Manned the fk up and made the changes I needed to have more respect not only from others, but also myself. I'm sorry, but most people who have "bad past" haven't seen chit, just looking for an excuse to be weak.

You don't have to suffer, but you have to have similar experiences to other human beings. There are very few people whose lives are absolutely perfect. In the scenario you described in the OP, the person is wealthy, very good looking, gets sex, social, good family, successful in career, successful in academia, successful in sports, etc. etc. This perfect kind of human is very rare to non-existent.

The more realistic scenario is if a child grows up with even some of the aforementioned advantages in life, i.e. wealth and good looks, they can just as easy be socially retarded, or can get addicted to drugs, or can get a bish pregnant at 15. All of these scenarios happened in high school to people I knew to be very well off. Just a personal example, but it happens on a global basis all of the time. Most people experience very negative occurrences in life, the significance of which is measured through the bias of their own experiences. You may not consider some of it as extreme as what you may have experienced, but I guarantee most of the kids you despise for "having it better" have their own laundry list of chit that fuks with their heads on daily basis, even though you consider those concerns to be mundane.

What determines whether a person is good or bad is more complicated and hard to distill into a one-size-fits-all formula. Even building a framework for guessing at it is difficult as the tolerances would be significant enough to make it unwieldy in application.

As far as the second part of your comments regarding society's focus on wealth, I agree that social media has made is somewhat worse, but not by much. This is Murka m8, we've been trying to keep up with the Jonses since the early 1900's. The same type of greed and crooked finances/politics that lead to the stock market crash is at work here. The culture of consumerism and advertisement has been around for far longer than instagram and I really don't think it has increase significantly in the past 50 years. You're looking at the past with rose tinted glasses my friend, it has always been a dog eat dog world out there. There was never a time when the majority of people were teaching their kids to do right and live right, that is an illusion.

There’s a thread. I’m trying to find it. It was a “crew” of sorts. I might be the only one left

it's true. As long as you have a system that allows people to reap what they sow, people who are born in poverty will work their asses off and get rich.
But if you have a society that gives money to people for virtue of being poor, you raise a bunch of entitled liberals.

Cretin.

son, nothing can change the cycle of ass---

hard times create strong men strong men create good times good times create piss men and piss men create bad times, this is the cycle of life, the beginning and end of almost every empire

smack ass boy, in piss

Hard men create good women.
Good women create weak men.
Weak men create slooty women.
Slooty women create hard men.

ill join you' ma lady''

I've been reading the Enchiridion, a stoicist ethical guide. It's interesting how they stress the "vulgarity" of relying on the external, and consider it a weakness to be bitter toward others for what they've earned, since you likely only want the result, not the hardship and struggle that came with it, and this is inherently dishonest. The seed of "up by your bootstraps" is in there, yet so is the necessity of meeting both success and failure with humility and graciousness.

This "strong men created good women, good women create weak men" circular logic is the height of that vulgarity, resigning us to the idea that people are just rolling with the external and can't be expected to take charge of themselves and their reactions.

I get where you're coming from wincel, but your posts always seem to be an attempt to get everyone to agree to some weird Rube-Goldberg set of rules by which you're good and the people you don't identify yourself with are bad. People who have the lives you envy must be terrible, by your reasoning, yet you've never seen how they actually came to have those lives. Most of the people I know who have significant personal and professional success are actually highly virtuous people, and most of the people I know who don't are a mess and avoided for a reason.

Life certainly isn't perfectly fair, but whatIfIToldYou.jpg that the real world is actually functioning very well and that the time you spend making up these excuses is just preventing you from engaging with it to your own detriment?

Hahahaha that’s great. I wish I could find the thread. I need a refresher and you need orientation.

OP- sorry for derailing, it’s over now though.

As you say, it isn't suffering in isolation that can lead to positive character growth (e.g., becoming a good person), it is the way you react to things in life. The good person needs to be able to take things (positive or negative) in stride, without creating massive cravings for the positive or aversions to the negative.

Tl;dr it isn't just about suffering. It is about overcoming adversity and also knowing how to deal with pleasurable experiences. Suffering is necessary but not sufficient. And there are quite a few necessary prerequisites to suffice the "good person" requirement.