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#2 Worked 12 Hours Cleaning Toilets And Can’t Take A Shower Because Our Water Smells Like Feces
"When such things happen to us, we have to fight the thought that the universe has conspired against us. Only once we come to terms with its indifference do we realize that we have only ourselves to rely on.
"In the face of difficulty, those who maintain a positive attitude and don't let themselves be defined by a negative event end up feeling and doing best in the long run," psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert, who's worked in a hospital emergency department, academia, a corporate setting, and even did a brief stint at the FBI before going into private practice, told Bored Panda.
"Know that you are bigger and stronger than one rejection or a negative situation," the author of 'Be Fearless: Change Your Life in 28 Days' added.
#4 We Don't Consider You Luggage 'Lost', We Like To Think It's Off On An Adventure
Bloomsburg University philosophy professor Steven Hales agrees that luck is a matter of perspective.
For one of his studies, Hales and experimental psychologist Jennifer Johnson tested the hypothesis that optimists are more likely to see other people's experiences as lucky, while pessimists focus on misfortune in the same set of facts.
They used real-life stories of "ambiguous luck"—for instance, a Japanese man who survived the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, practically unscathed, and lived a long life, and an American soldier who had a rocket-propelled grenade, which did not explode, lodged in his abdomen. Both men survived horrific experiences, which makes them lucky—unless you think that the fact that bad things happened to them at all makes them unlucky.
#7 So I’m Watching My Brothers Dog For The Week And He Went After A Tin Of Chocolate Up High On The Sneaker Shelf
#8 Passing A Kidneystone On My First Day Of Work In The Bathroom Before Our Safety Meeting Where I Had To Meet Everyone. 4mm Stone Passed After 5 Weeks From First Sign
#9 Starting The New Year With A Collapsed Lung. At Least It Should All Be Uphill From Here
To assess the relationship between personality traits and perceptions of fortune, Hales and Johnson gave study participants a commonly used psychological assessment called the Life Orientation Test. With this, the researchers determined the extent to which subjects were optimists or pessimists.
The participants then rated the luck of people in ambiguous real-life stories as unlucky, somewhat unlucky, somewhat lucky, or lucky.
#11 My Car Window Was Broken Into, Im Completely Broke And There Was Nothing To Steal From My Car
The researchers found "a significant positive correlation" between the subjects' level of optimism and how lucky they thought others were.
"One of the things this means is that the more optimistic you are, the more you think others are lucky. If you are more of a pessimist, you’re likelier to see others as suffering bad luck,” Hales wrote.
#14 Got Bitten By A Bat And Spent The First Day Of 2024 Getting Rabies Shots
#17 Did This Annoyingly Difficult Prize Puzzle Just To Find Out After That It Was Used And The Code Had Already Been Redeemed
But while luck is subjective, uncertainty isn't and it follows us every day.
"Certainty provides predictability and the feeling of control. When we aren't sure how things will go and what the outcomes [are going to be], our brains tend to create endings as a way to gain control," Jonathan Alpert explained. "The problem with this sometimes is that it is not always accurate."
#18 Somebody Rummaged Through Nearly All The Packages In My Apartment Mail Room On New Years Day
