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Comment by PuppyTailWags | Hacker News Reader

> If you don’t get what you want: it’s due to your decisions.

Asking genuinely, because I struggle with determining how much of what I don't get can be attributed to me:

What if I wanted to be healthy, but have $<any number of chronic, debilitating conditions with no clear identified cause, mechanism, and or cure>? I recently listened to a podcast where two people try to follow life-advice books and determine if it actually helped them, and one of the hosts had an extremely distressing time trying to attribute why her abnormal mammogram result wasn't being followed up on by her doctor, despite daily calls for two weeks, was something that was due to her decisions.

[How does this apply to being abused as a child? Being a domestic abuse survivor? Being the victim of a hate crime, displaced due to war or other disaster?]

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Not the OP but I typically hear such advice in the form of thinking of oneself and one's circumstances as being entirely one's responsibility.

>What if I wanted to be healthy, but have $<any number of chronic, debilitating conditions with no clear identified cause, mechanism, and or cure>?

Then the person in the hypothetical would need to decide to define healthy realistically for their condition. While it may be something you want, wanting something impossible is a non-starter.

>one of the hosts had an extremely distressing time trying to attribute why her abnormal mammogram result wasn't being followed up on by her doctor, despite daily calls for two weeks

Great example, in this case the host can decide to call another doctor's office to get a second opinion. Or following up in person. Or escalating to that doctor's leadership/board.

The host actually did follow up in person and tried to escalate. There wasn't another doctor's office to send them to, because the tests were explicitly called by a specific doctor and there would need to be authorization to transfer the tests... authorization from the doctor who wasn't responsive. Like I said, this was extremely distressing to hear about the host needing to apparently decide that this was their fault and the resultant distress the host was experiencing when after two weeks and many attempts from many angles, they were unsuccessful, and according to the advice they had no one to blame but themselves.

Get out of your head and think about yourself. Forget all labels. Listen to your gut and inner voice. Do what makes you happy.

If you don’t know what makes you happy that’s step one.

I'm afraid I don't understand how any of what you said has anything to do with attributing events in my life to my decisions. It just sounds like strategies to make decisions for future things, which isn't relevant. Could you explain?

The choice is in how to think about and respond to external conditions, not in denying the existence of external conditions.

Yes, I'm asking precisely how to think about external circumstances. If your thinking is that outcomes are because of your decisions, it means if a doctor blows you off after a cancer screening returns abnormal results you must've decided something to result in this. The podcaster decided the only logic there is that if you didn't want the doctor to blow you off you shouldn't have decided to proactively screen yourself for cancer.

Personally, I struggled with thinking about events in my life and my decisions leading to those events precisely because of seeing other people try to take that logic and apply it in good faith, resulting in horrible conclusions. That someone could've prevented their fibromyalgia and therefore they are at fault for getting sick. That someone's child abuse was something they need to take responsibility about.

Don't worry too much about trying to make sense of that advice. It's a bad take that only comes from people who've had the privilege of all of the problems they've known in life being self-inflicted[1]. (That's for the original commenter. The person you're responding to now is engaging in a major moving of the goalposts.)

Here's what I've been prone to tell people instead: you know how to always get what you want—always? It's by wanting what you're going to get.

Some people misunderstand this. It's not about settling or doing nothing. It's rather the opposite. It's to get people to go through the process of interrogating themselves about their wants in a way that engages the logical part of their brain—which is ultimately most likely to be the thing that leads to working out a path to whatever that want is, so long as it's reasonable to think that they can actually get it. In the extreme case you present: "Is it unreasonable for me to want to the abuse to stop?" The answer, of course, is an emphatic no. There's no need to stop wanting that.

In figuring out whether it is reasonable or unreasonable, the question becomes: what is required in order to actually get it?

1. Example <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25468799>

> The person you're responding to now is engaging in a major moving of the goalposts.)

Sorry you feel this way. I genuinely tried to share advice that helped me. The negativity here is astounding. Time to leave.

You are not the goalpost mover[1] that person was responding to...

> Sorry you feel this way.

Time for a new edict: set aside the impulse to hand out apology-shaped non-apologies.

> The negativity here is astounding.

Have you considered your decisions and how it's a result of them?

1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33072621>

> I paid off $240,000 in 3 years by not being an idiot

> Edit - I went back and checked, it was $140k.

Wow, this person confabulated $100k of merit to themselves. If that's not self-love, I don't know what is.

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