It feels like some people are born to win. For some success starts young: athletic achievements, honor societies, scholarships, internships, high paying job after a prestigious collegiate career, smoking hot and smart wives or hunky genius husbands, and, finally, spawn who enjoy more of the same. For others it has to be cultivated, but it tastes just as sweet, perhaps sweeter, when success inevitably finds them.
I’m not interested in them.
What about the people who should ostensibly succeed but never do. They are the high schoolers whose parents always came home early and ruined the party. Their alarms fail to go off on critical days at school or work. They crush practice and freeze at game time.
For better or worse, they’re losers.
There are plentiful and worthwhile explanations of why someone may chronically engage in failing to achieve success — however they might define that nebulous term. A few of them are obvious: racism, socioeconomic oppression created by an increasing wealth gap. Something called “learned helplessness” neatly expresses a psychological mechanism derived from ubiquitous exposure to the innumerable hurdles to success. A generalized and somewhat oversimplified description of “learned helplessness:” constant exposure to negative or difficult stimuli beat the recipient into submission in such a way that they no longer have the will to seek a path around those negative and difficult stimuli even if that path is sometimes known and known to require minimal effort. They fail to even attempt because why bother? Even if things work out once, they won’t keep working out.
And that’s that. Or it isn’t.
It seems to me that for whatever obvious explanatory power “learned helplessness” possesses it ignores a more fundamental, a more base question: what of the anomalies? What of the minority student from a perpetually poor socioeconomic area (along with all the stigmas and challenges that presents) who works their ass off and surpasses their entire ancestry. They, despite the world’s persistence, make it.
The question “learned helplessness” fails to adequately explain is: how did that happen? What is it about those anomalies - male, woman, minority, rich or poor - that enables them to unlearn or fail to learn that they were supposed to be helpless?
Further, what of the people born into a lineage of success with no ostensible hurdles before them and yet they fail to ever achieve anything meaningful? I don’t want to harp on this so just picture the inverse of the first anomaly we touched on, or, if you must, consider some of the socialites on Instagram.
Why does some people actively work to fail? What makes those who seem born into a no-win scenario win nonetheless?
Anomaly 1 doesn’t fail when the majority wouldn’t blame them for doing so; Anomaly 2 fails despite favorable circumstances.
What are some possibly ways to explain these anomalies?
(1) Anomalies in genetics or neurology
(2) A more nuanced “learned helplessness”
(3) Survival of the fittest; destruction of the un-fittest
(4) Reversion to the mean
(5) Luck/Unluckiness
(6) Evil spirits
I’ve just started to read the academic literature on the topic. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Point me to obvious answers or interesting cases.
