I find it odd that you conclude with a focus on an imparted or innate desire to succeed when the major factors among your family members who didn't succeed seem to be a deadly combination of mental illness and addiction.
Having seen exactly the same sort of split in behaviors play within one immediate family makes me think the disasters are the tails of genetic coinflips.
Yeah, I guess that's a bit cruel. (note: I think of addiction as a mental illness as well).
Mental illness can be brutal to both the person suffering from it, and everybody around them. It affects families in ways that no other illness does, and I think that despite advocacy attempts to align our thinking of it as "just another disease like any other" it's fundamentally a different thing.
I have a pair of cousins, from my Mother's side. Their father was career military, good solid guy and all that. The oldest cousin lives in a bottle, the younger one went to school, got married, has had good jobs, lives otherwise really well.
Another group of 3 cousins, father worked blue collar jobs, has a mild drinking problem but otherwise supported his family well enough:
- one accidentally got pregnant, turns out the father was violently abusive, after sending her to the hospital she got out of the relationship, works decent blue collar jobs and supports herself and her daughter just fine. She looked like a failure case, but I'd call her a success case these days.
- next oldest lives in a bottle or with a needle in his arms. He's "trying" to go to school, but it's pretty inconsistent. Spend most of his waking hours partying or looking for parties. Is it middle child syndrome? I dunno.
- the youngest has a skills based job, does relatively well, parties a little, but not too much, is otherwise a productive member of society.
So I'm not entirely convinced it's nature or nurture. There's definitely some kind of genetic factor at play, and some kind of environmental factor.
The real question is, can you take somebody who could objectively be described as a failure at life and train them/educate them/psychotherapy them into changing their decision tree to seek success instead of immediate gratification?
Can we treat "broken decision making process for life choices" as a mental illness?
>'There's definitely some kind of genetic factor at play, and some kind of environmental factor.'
Absolutely.
>'The real question is, can you take somebody who could objectively be described as a failure at life and train them/educate them/psychotherapy them into changing their decision tree to seek success instead of immediate gratification?'
My armchair theory on this says yes.
Yes, as much as you can train/educate/psych the underlying problems which lead to the broken decisions.
I think we can consider broken decision making process for life choices as a single symptom manifesting from mental processes that are 'out of spec' which may or may not be recognized as specific illnesses.
I tend to think of most everything mental as a continuum. A million analog variables with all sorts of dependencies and feedback loops producing the color of a person and we're holding up a handful of Pantone swatches trying to figure out which matches to determine what they 'have'.
Big problem is, I think there's a fairly limited window on these things an incomplete understanding of what all the various dials do (nurture) and even less about how they interrelate (nature).
Ideally, you're trained and educated within your childhood bubble by your parents, siblings, relatives or some other 'safe' person. Then, suddenly the instinct and extended social contract of 'help kids, don't hurt them' falls away completely and any sort of training becomes far harder as this person is suddenly fair game to be exploited or discarded.
That's not exactly how I wanted any of that to come out, but I didn't want to leave genuine discussion hanging.
Having seen exactly the same sort of split in behaviors play within one immediate family makes me think the disasters are the tails of genetic coinflips.