IT’S NOT WHAT HAPPENS TO YOU . . . OR IS IT?

W. Mitchell has quite a story to tell. In a motorbike accident back in the 1970s, he suffered horrific burns to most of his body, including his face. Most of his fingers were amputated. A few years later, misfortune had him in her sights once again, when a small plane he was piloting crashed, rendering him a paraplegic. Now he travels the world and delivers magnetic presentations, telling audiences that ‘it’s not what happens to you; it’s what you do about it’ that matters. There are others, too, who cite a similar refrain, despite not having a comparable life-changing experience. The American composer Terry Riley is one: ‘It’s not what happens to you in life that matters; what matters is how you deal with it!’ Evangelical Christian pastor Chuck Swindoll is another who I’m pretty sure didn’t use robust empirical methodology to determine that ‘life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it’. Credit, though, should go to the ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus who was probably the first to claim that ‘it’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters’. And he should know. He was born a slave in what we now call Turkey, and was tortured by his master to such an extent he never walked properly again. He subsequently had a thriving career.

But whether or not a tragic past exists to justify the use of this motivational phrase, and irrespective of the mountains that were climbed (ugh), the barriers that were overcome (ugh again) and the adversity that was endured, the fact remains it’s really not that true. The notion that life circumstances are not important, that they don’t impose fundamental limits on one’s life, is borderline patronising. Not even borderline patronising – just patronising.

To understand why that’s the case, let’s look at a scholarly work that was important for three reasons. First, it was longitudinal, which means it tracked people’s wellbeing over extended periods of time – in this case up to two decades. Second, the sample size was huge: 40,000 folks in Germany and another 27,000 in the United Kingdom. Third, the analysis looked at many studies that had been completed in the recent past. What the researchers wanted to find out was whether significant life events, such as divorce and unemployment, have an impact on people’s perceptions of their wellbeing. Well, what they discovered was that it takes widows and widowers approximately seven years before their satisfaction in life returns to the level it was at prior to their partner’s death. For those who get divorced or lose their job, their life satisfaction never returns to the point it was at before the unexpected change. Perhaps nowhere is this more profound than for those who are suddenly hit with a permanent disability. The raft of studies leads to the conclusion that ‘happiness levels do change, adaptation is not inevitable, and life events do matter’.⁵⁶

But let’s get extra-inquisitive for a moment. That study was based on people’s perceptions of their own happiness, which in a way reinforces the message professed by Mitchell, Riley, Swindoll and Epictetus, which is that shit happens, and so what you have to do is stop feeling like a victim and instead think of yourself as a victor. In other words, snap out of it! They would easily win that argument if that meta-analysis I just mentioned was the only evidence to back up the extraordinary effect of life events beyond our control.

Let’s look at another one that’s much more serious: depression. Many studies in the past have found that life circumstances – such as childhood abuse, parental divorce, chronic disease and financial hardship – are all indicators of depression later in life. In an Irish study of more than 3500 people, researchers looked at some additional variables:⁵⁷

•childhood economic conditions;

•childhood health;

•family distress (while still a child);

•current socioeconomic status; and

•current health.

Perhaps unsurprisingly to those of us who are acutely aware of the lifelong impact of major life events, the researchers found that, among men, ‘growing up in a poor family, having had a parent with substance abuse problems and reporting poor childhood health have significant total effects on the level of depressive symptoms at old age’. Among women, ‘growing up in a poor family or poor health in childhood has significant total effects on late-life depression’. The enduring impact of what happens to you as a child was emphasised in the study when the researchers controlled for current health and current socioeconomic status. So even when an individual’s present-day health and financial circumstances are taken into account, ‘those who had poor childhood health [still] have higher depressive symptoms’. It is indeed very much what happens to you that influences your life for a long, long time – no matter ‘what you do about it’.

One example that’s fun to debate is smoking. That a billion people around the world still smoke cigarettes, and that 5 million of them die each year from tobacco-related diseases, is staggering when you consider the enormous amount of freely available evidence that proves beyond any doubt whatsoever that it’s a product designed to infect its purchaser with a terminal illness. So why can’t people just quit smoking? The frequent debate often coalesces around smokers being too weak, too manipulated, too hedonic, too stressed, too fat, too unhappy, too insecure, too whatever.

What each of these factors dismisses too easily, as one study put it, are ‘the causes of the causes’. In an analysis of more than 2000 British people from the time they were born until the time they were 66 years of age, the researchers concluded that ‘childhood circumstances predicted adult smoking habits’. They go further. If a participant had a father who hailed from a blue-collar social class, that participant had a higher chance of being an adult smoker. If a participant had a mother who only managed to get a primary school education and nothing more, that participant similarly had a higher chance of being an adult smoker. The researchers conclude: ‘This study highlights the major role of early life circumstances as causes of inequalities in health. It emphasises how important it is, in the context of the policy debate, to recognise the intergenerational transmission of risk and the accumulation of disadvantages that can occur during childhood.’ Indeed, what their research clearly demonstrates is that what happens in one’s childhood is ‘almost as powerful’ in determining the risk of mortality in adulthood as smoking itself, such that ‘the effects of early life circumstances were seen to extend far into adult life’.⁵⁸

That doesn’t mean that what one does as an adult has no effect. Of course it does. But to pretend that your circumstances leading up to that point don’t have an influence – and a significant one at that – is, well, to pretend.

Let’s now look at another example of decisions in adulthood that are influenced significantly by life circumstances: the decision to become a sex worker. Now, a sanctimonious individual might assert that deciding to be a sex worker is a voluntary act, which means it’s a perfect case of ‘how you react’, ‘how you deal with it’ and ‘what you do about it’. But it’s really not that straightforward, as more trusted information indicates.

One study was conducted in the Indian state of Nagaland, where thousands of women earn an income from sex work and where more than 16 per cent are infected with HIV. The researchers surveyed 200 of these women, and interviewed 30 more for greater depth of understanding. What they learned was that there are indeed life circumstances that compel these vulnerable people to make the decision to become a sex worker. Here are some statistics that illustrate the point. The largest proportion of sex workers were previously unemployed. The second largest were school dropouts. Likewise, a vast majority were living in insecure accommodation, such as a rental property, a friend’s place or a pimp’s house. More than half described their family relationship in unfavourable terms. In two-thirds of cases, their entry into sex work was unplanned, with the arrangements most often made by someone else and at a venue such as a hotel. And as for condom use – well, that was non-existent in the early days of their sex work. One of the participants describes it like this: ‘There are some useless men who won’t use condoms. It becomes difficult to negotiate with them because they threaten me, and so to avoid creating a problem I do it without using a condom.’⁵⁹

It is easy but ignorant and insulting to suggest that these women have a choice. It’s frequently their only option if they want to earn enough to feed their children and other relatives. That they were primary school dropouts or without gainful employment or afflicted by a form of homelessness is, to paraphrase an earlier study, a selection of the myriad ‘causes of the causes’, many of which are beyond an individual’s immediate control.

Let’s look at one final piece of research before bringing this series of pious quotations to a close. This one looked at the world of crime, and, more specifically, the factors that led people to embark into it. The researchers were intrigued by prior studies that found criminality among men was lower when they were employed, in the military or married. They wanted to expand on this empirical work by conducting a study that analysed criminals and non-criminals, males and females, from the age of 12 until the age of 72.

Before going further, it’s important to distinguish between two schools of thought: the ‘static theory’ and the ‘dynamic theory’. The static theory suggests that the extent to which an individual commits a criminal offence is due to his or her own propensity for crime. In other words, some people are inherently more inclined to be criminals, and nothing that happens in their life will change that. Conversely, the dynamic theory proposes that, sure, some people are more predisposed to criminality than others, but that other circumstances in their lives push them over the edge into criminal behaviour. So this study, in a sense, was a contest between static theory and dynamic theory.

The researchers analysed over 4600 individuals in the Netherlands who had committed serious crimes, such as robbery, violence, murder, rape, child molestation and drug offences. They included in their analysis another sample of Dutch folk, this time a thousand or so who had committed other types of crime, such as shoplifting, vandalism, fraud, theft and assault. The results reflected a robust defence of the dynamic theory, because ‘static theories offer too simplified a view on development of crime over time’. Convictions, for example, among those whose crimes were of a milder variety, were far more prevalent among those who had been separated from their partner for a long period of time. More specifically, when an individual was married, that individual was 27 per cent less likely to be convicted of a crime. In contrast, those who were separated were 44 per cent more likely to be criminals, compared to when they were married. Even among the hardcore criminals, being divorced boosted the rate at which they offended by 13 per cent. ‘Overall, these figures clearly show the substantial consequences of transitions in life circumstances, as predicted by dynamic theories,’ the scholars concluded.⁶⁰

That doesn’t mean we excuse crime or forgive it. It just means we understand it better when we look at the ‘causes of the causes’. That’s only possible if we’re not glibly uttering that what happens to an individual is unimportant. Manifestly, it’s extremely important in determining the person they become and the decisions they eventually make.

Imagine, too, being the victim of those crimes. These are serious events that can alter the rest of one’s life in ways that are inconceivable – too inconceivable to simplistically assume that an adjustment in attitude will enable recovery.

Ultimately, if what happens to someone in life can influence them for the better – such as a happy marriage, a lottery win, a good upbringing, a safe haven, a secure job – then surely the opposite can have a negative effect. So let’s edit the citations that began this chapter, beginning with W. Mitchell’s:

‘It’s not only what happens to you; it’s also what you do about it – assuming you haven’t been too screwed up by what happened to you.’

Something similar for Terry Riley:

‘It’s not only what happens to you in life that matters; what matters is also how you deal with it – assuming you have the physical and mental capacity to actually deal with it.’

A mathematical adjustment for Chuck Swindoll:

‘Life is mostly what happens to you and partly how you react to it.’

And, finally, something a little simpler for Epictetus:

‘It’s not only what happens to you, but also how you react to it that matters.’

 

56R.E. Lucas, 2007, ‘Adaptation and the set-point model of subjective well-being: Does happiness change after major life events?’, Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 75–79.

57Y. Kamiya, M. Doyle, J.C. Henretta & V. Timonen, 2013, ‘Depressive symptoms among older adults: The impact of early and later life circumstances and marital status’, Aging & Mental Health, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 349–357.

58I. Giesinger, P. Goldblatt, P. Howden-Chapman, M. Marmot, D. Kuh & E. Brunner, 2013, ‘Association of socioeconomic position with smoking and mortality: the contribution of early life circumstances in the 1946 birth cohort’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, vol. 68, no. 1, pp. 275–279.

59K.J. Bowen, B. Dzuvichu, A.E. Devine, J. Hocking, M. Kermode, & R. Rungsung, 2011, ‘Life circumstances of women entering sex work in Nagaland, India’, Asia-Pacific Journal of Public Health, vol. 23, no. 6, pp. 843–851.

60A.A.J. Blokland & P. Nieuwbeerta, 2005, ‘The effects of life circumstances on longitudinal trajectories of offending’, Criminology, vol. 43, no. 4, pp. 1203–1240.