Are some people born lucky and some born unlucky?

I believe some people are born under a lucky star. My son most definitely was! It never ceases to amaze me how everything he does always works out more than brilliantly. Yes he’s worked hard but in a career he adores so that’s a plus. He’s a great bloke and I’m very happy for him but as his mum I can tell you from day one he’s always been lucky. I think it’s very glib to say you make your own luck. Some people spend their lives working hard, being good people and yet time after time something always goes wrong. And they’ve tried to make their own luck!

welbeck I really like what you’ve said and it resonates with me. Life can be random, and we do not all start with the same life chances, even decisions we make may not be truly under our control. We can’t choose our parents, poor or rich, clever or dull, nurturing or neglectful. Our genetic predisposition to certain diseases, our personality types, or early life experiences, our intelligence. So much baggage will influence our decision making good or bad. It pleases us to think we have control, but do we?

Remember that rhyme ‘Monday’s child’? Seems to have been pretty accurate across my family! ( If you’re as daft as me and want to check this out, you can convert birthdates to their weekday with an internet search…)

M0nica

We have no control over the events that happen to us in life, but we do have control over how we respond to them and manage them.

I come from a family where time and again people have shown their capacity to triumph over adversity, unaided by money or influential friends. Just sheer bloodymindedness and a refusal to be cowed by 'bad luck'. As a result they were very 'lucky'

Perhaps they were lucky in the genes they inherited.

Or lucky in the examples their ancestors gave them?

Or lucky in the way their brains were wired in a positive not negative way? (determined by nature - hormones and nurture - parenting).

Things are far more complicated than at first we thought.

I really dislike that saying, ‘The harder you work, the luckier you get.’
Of course it’s true in many cases, when it’s a case of putting the extra effort in, e.g. for exams or at work, but there are plenty of people who have always worked hard, who never seem to be favoured by fortune at all.
How often do you hear of people who, despite working as hard as anybody, are overlooked for promotion purely because they haven’t sucked up to the right people (kissed the right arses!) - or e.g. deviously taken the credit for someone else’s work? Etc. Etc.

Though in theory I suppose you could call either of those ploys ‘making your own luck’.

Songstress , Samuel Butler wrote this in (approx.) 1880 : Fortune is a fickle foster-mother, who showers her gifts at random upon her nurslings. Trace a man's career from his cradle to his grave and mark how Fortune has treated him. Fortune can espy her favourites long before they are born. Seldom does she relent towards those whom she has suckled unkindly and seldom does she completely fail a favoured nursling.

I totally agree with you, Songstress !!

As a person who never felt particularly lucky and living through some pretty bad times I have always tried to remain positive. 'A new day a new dawn,' 'life can only get better' and all that stuff. Nothing life threatening but any medical problem has been 'unusual'. Yes my cataract operation too required additional laser surgery and is still not right. Never mind I can still see.

Now I have a son who has always been positive, believed that he is strong and his body and mind are able to cope with anything. He is calm, compassionate and the best friend and father anyone could imagine. He is now going through a personal hell over which neither he nor I have any control due to two toxic people who seem intent on destroying him. Having a grown son sobbing in my arms is one of the toughest things I have ever gone through and it is so hard to convince him that one way or another life will carry on and time will heal. Yes both of us have been 'lucky' in other ways that are hard to remember at the moment but does bad luck exist? I don't know. Can we change it? Again I don't know. Meanwhile I can only hold him and let him know he is loved. As for me time's running out but I still hope.

One of the things that particularly worry me are the way people who are poor etc etc (everything you say) are constantly being told by more successful people, who claim that they want to help them, that they do not stand a chance of improving their lot because they are poor etc etc.

If these people did more to show them how to succeed, talked more about people who had succeeded, despite the odds, treating these successes as normal people not freaks and encouraged and showed them ways out. In other words offered them hope not despair, the problem would be reduced

The problem is Kadinsky, on both sides of my family people born and living in deep poverty, Irish immigrants living in slums, have used their 'luck' to get out of that condition into a level of comfort. However it was several generations ago when the pressures on the poor not to succeed were far less.

I consider myself to have been very lucky, I had a long and happy marriage to a wonderful man. Enough said.

The main part of my 'luck' was definitely at birth. I was surrounded and steeped in deep love by my Mum. That never changed or diminished. Otherwise born into poverty amongst hard workers and huge encourages who believed in the value of education. I think and hope my Mum would be happy with my lot now.

I'm sure I read somewhere that the gap in longevity, which had started to close, has widened again with austerity (pre covid)

M0nica

On the whole, rich people live longer, enjoy better health, live in nicer, low crime neighbourhoods, go to better schools, have better jobs etc etc - that is a fact.
Look at coronavirus - disproportionately affecting the poor.
Prisons are full of people from poor disadvantaged backgrounds growing up on sink estates - many of these people can not ‘make their own luck’ - all the cards are stacked against them.
Good looking people also tend to do better in life - tall men are more successful than short men.
So basically, if you’re a short, unattractive male living on a crime ridden estate with no hopers for parents......you’re life is never going to be easy.
As for the rest of us.
It’s down to luck & attitude.

I think when things are going badly we believe we're unlucky but an optimistic type doesn't take things to heart so they appear to be luckier if you see what I mean.

I'm a serious type and I always said that a childhood friend would always bounce back if something bad happened to them. Late MIL was a happy-go-lucky type, she refused to look at bad things or take them seriously. Perhaps it was simply her nature?

Kandinsky you can buy yourself out of some problems, but death, disease, disablement, catastrophic relationships, dessertion, estrangement, abuse of all kinds are not affected by money. Indeed the misuse of money leads to most of the above.

Look at the number of millionaires and billionaires, whose family life is one long car crash, with all of the above list happening as the result of all their money, not despite.

It’s all down to luck, being in the right place at the right time, rolling the dice in risky situations and your number coming up.
I definitely think being wealthy helps massively in life though. You can buy yourself out of many a problem.
Being poor is no fun as Jarvis Cocker so eloquently wrote;

You'll never live like common people
You'll never do whatever common people do
You'll never fail like common people
You'll never watch your life slide out of view
And you dance and drink and screw
Because there's nothing else to do

I do believe that people make their own luck. We all have choices in life - some make the wrong Choices. Having said that when Illness or disease strikes , or accidents not caused by ourselves , that’s When fate takes over.

Also what type of family we are born into, can make us the people we turn out to be.

This is an interesting topic. Although I agree that for the most part we create our own luck by good decisions and hard work, there seem to be some people either born at the end of a rainbow or under a grey cloud. Nanna8, what a horrible story that woman had. I can't imagine how she carried on.

Even in my own family, some see a cup half full and make the best of circumstance, while others moan about what they don't have, or things that didn't go their way.

How do some end up in a democratic first world country with a lovely family and roof over head rather than scrambling out an existence in a drought ridden third world country? Nothing other than luck, I would say. Or Karma, but I don't really understand the concept well.

Then, of course, some of us make our own luck - others never try!

songstress60, I do know that some people sail through life and others have endless problems, heartbreak etc. What I'd question is your expectation of 'fair shares'.

Life certainly isn't fair - so why expect it to be? It's nothing to do with planets or luck, just pure chance.

It also seems to be that you can have a run of bad luck for some reason just as you can be on a winning streak. A person I used to work with lost her husband at a very young age, he was in his 30s and then her son was killed in a road accident. Believe it or not, her other son died by choking in a restaurant and her third son just couldn’t cope so he suicided. I have never come across such awful bad luck before or since. You didn’t know what to say to her, poor lady.

So I am not sure what I believe. But I am starting to wonder.

One of my husbands employees seems to have pretty bad luck.

Once his room mates were smoking in the garage and started the townhouse on fire while he was upstairs. He got out ok.

Yesterday, he was pumping gas and a car came speeding into the gas station and hit him and his car. He woke up in the hospital, not remembering what happened. He is ok other than a concussion.

At first I thought he was unlucky, but now I wonder if he is actually lucky.

I know someone who had surgery to improve their sight, which went wrong and caused problems for years.

I also know someone whose eye got "whipped" as she passed by a pampas grass in someone's garden, and did a whole lot of damage.

Wrong place, wrong time, definitely!

My mother said I was a lucky child - born healthy, reasonably intelligent, living in a country where on the whole the rule of law prevailed, born at the right time to benefit from the 1944 Education Act. We were extremely hard up and I always knew I would have to be responsible for my own actions, but I do think she was right.

I know two people who have had problems after cataract surgery, one mild (he won't go back to see about it) and one very serious.
I hope they manage to sort yours out, songstress.

Life is full of ups and downs for everyone, it's not a matter of luck although I think we can be in the right place at the right time and experience serendipity or vice versa when everything seems to go wrong.