| Victim of Fate?Are we Victim of fate? Or we made all our choices by ourselves? According to Alfred Adler (1958), we people are free to act, determine our fate and personality and thus affect our style of life. People attain different ability through heredity and can make use of these abilities on what the environment has given to create their own life. However, while the statement sounds optimistic enough, it seems that it is not always the case. Alfred Adler (1958) proposed that there will be feeling of superiority inspired when people overcome their feelings of inferiority by dealing with different personal problems. Through this way, people can creatively shape their own life and thus have the power to determine their own fate instead of being a ‘victim of fate’. The idea of creative self suggested by Adler (1958) is true in certain circumstances. Sometimes, people complain about their lives in a way they pretend to be having no choice to choose from at the first place. But the fact is, at least according to Adler (1958), these people have made their choice at the very first place and they just pretend they do not have a choice to ease their feeling of dissatisfaction in life. A very typical example occurs in school is, students used to tell others how tired they got after an overnight revision and were thus worried for not performing well in the examination due to the lack of sleep. However, these students were actually trying to find an excuse for themselves in case they failed the examination they would not feel that bad because they would be able to tell themselves they were just too tired. As suggested by Adler (1958), these students actually had choices. Had they started revision earlier, they would not have had to stay up so late. On top of that, they also knew, even then they spent a whole night revision, they could not cram much within just one night. Their “overnight revision” was just an excuse for their indifference in study and resultant poor result. Unfortunately, ‘fate’ is a word means too much to be just an excuse. While Adler’s statement is true on people having choice but choose a choice for an easy excuse, in many more other circumstances, people just do not have much choice. Being a person who has never made my choice based on the ability to make excuse out of it, I have been to a situation where no choice could be made. Kam was a friend of mine who I have known since I was 12 years old. Kam has been a really lazy person and he never had revision even there was an examination going on the next day. While both of us did not attain good result in the HKAL examination, his result was way worse than me. Not only did he not manage to attain ‘pass’ for the two AL subject, but he also failed the two AS level language subject with U grades. On the other hand, although I have failed two AL subject too, I managed to attain C grades for both languages subject. I may not be much smarter than Kam, but judging from the result of HKAL examination, at least I was not a bit worse or less talented than he was. However, just because he is of a really rich family background and his family has got a really good social network, while I stayed at Hong Kong studying for a degree that does not even provide me a proper GPA system and this was the best choice I had made at that time, Kam got an offer from an Australian university. I am not trying to complain how unfair it was for a less-talented people to receive a better offer than I could, however, this example proves that not all people can make a choice. Of course, one can argue, I could have tried harder and thus got an offer from a better university, however, whether I have attained a better result should not be affecting my ability to make a choice later if we people are as free to make a choice as Adler suggested. Moreover, had I worked harder and got better result, I would not be fit into this comparison with Kam, a lazy student who chose to work lazily and thus got a result worse than mine but manage to pick a better choice later for who his family members are. Kam’s situation also demonstrated that not only can we not make choice freely, our capability to make the choice we like is not restricted from our ability or hard work or even the choice made earlier, instead, our capability to make choice is actually more related to our family background or social status of the family- at least at the young age which we cannot do much yet to climb ourselves up on the social ladder. But can we choose which family we were given born to? Certainly not. For a lot of people, there are not many choices to choose from, when we talk about choice, we are talking about “good choice, better choice, best choice, bad choice, worse choice, worst choice”, people like Kam, who have advanced family background, could choose the best choice such as studying at a university where environment and academic reputation are both excellent, or he could choose the worst choice to go astray and became a drug dealer. What Kam can choose from is what we call “choice”. But in many people like me, who does not have the advanced family background, in a lot of times, we are choosing from “bad choice, worse choice, worst choice”, are these really choices which we can choose freely? Absolutely not, this is more of a “compromise” than a “choice”. Actually, there are still numerous things in our life not up to our choices. Can we choose how we look like? Not really unless you choose to do a plastic surgery, but before you do that, you have to save enough money for this expensive choice. To have such an expensive surgery done, you have to be employed with a high profile company so as to be paid well. However, according to The Economist (2007), latest studies have proven that beautiful people are more capable to get a well-paid job than those ugly ones. And if ugly people cannot get a well-paid job at the very first place, they are not very likely to accumulate enough money within foreseeable period to make their own choice of how they want themselves to be looking like. Or can we choose a better brain so we are cleverer? Not likely. Can we choose our nationality? Not likely unless you apply for the nationality and have fulfilled the strict requirement, but you cannot make this choice when you are teenagers unless your family again, have advanced background. After all, we do have choices sometimes, at least we can choose to look at the vulnerability in life as challenges and thus be happier. However, in a lot of times, we are just not capable to make choices. Perhaps the choices are equally bad, or we are making “compromises” rather than “choices”. Rich or better-off people are still always the one who can make most “choices” available for them, leaving the worse-off people and the poor having only “compromises”, the ability to choose a choice does not even necessarily related to personal ability or personal talent. But finally, at least Adler(1958) is right about something, we can always look at things the way we like to, this is one of the very few things, if any, we can choose. We can look at unpleasant incident as they are challenges or other optimistic interpretation such as “this is so cool that I come across difficulties!” or other pessimistic interpretation such as “this is so sad”. We really do have a choice on how we interpret these things, these are our choices. But, when you experience traumatic difficulties, do you still think you have a choice to choose? Even your way to look at it? We are not victim of fate, at least not totally. We are making choice every minute, just the options given are often under the framework of fate. When you have a better fate, you have better options and thus you have a better sense of self-creative and the feelings that your life is in your hand. On the contrary, when you do not have quite a good framework of fate, you have worse options and thus feel like you cannot choose and have the feelings that your life is out of control. Even though I believe I am lucky enough to make most choice that are really what I want it to be, I cannot deny the fact that “fate” is still the main key to determine one’s everything even one’s outlook on life. After all, as stated above, people do not even have a choice on whether or not they believe in the ability to change their life by making choices, instead, this belief is influenced by their “fate”. Therefore, Alfred Adler (1958)’s idea of creative self cannot generalise everyone’s experience and thus is defective. |
