You are only able to make a conscious choice about things in your control. There are also a lot of things outside of your control.

Of course there are things outside of our control. But since you can't control those things, there isn't a whole lot of point worrying about them, is there? (From the point of view of the individual).

I agree that there are systemic issues with "the system" as it exists today, and I have my ideas about how we should address some of those issues in terms of public policy, etc. But, at the end of the day, you can only play the cards you're dealt (so to speak).

What you can control, though, is your reaction to things, regardless of whether or not you can control those things. If something bad happens (you get dealt a bad hand) you can quit (fold), and jump in the bathtub with a toaster and end it all. Or you can soldier on and make the best of things, and maybe, just maybe, improve your lot.

I'm reminded of a couple of old sayings / parables I heard once. One goes like this:

A master was living in a house in the woods. One night, a storm came through and tore the roof off of his house. He said "I am happy, for now I can see the stars shining in the night sky more clearly".

The other is:

A man was running from a lion, when he came to the edge of a cliff, with a sheer plunge 1000 feet down to jagged rocks. With no where else to go, he went over the edge and started climbing down some vines. Now he's trapped, with rocks below him, and the lion above him. Then a mouse appears and starts chewing on the vine. He notices some strawberries growing on the cliff face and plucks a handful and eats them. They were the most delicious strawberries he ever had".

It's the perfect excuse to individualize all kind of problems. You just did not work enough and put not effort into it.

I guess it depends on your perspective, but - in my mind - this isn't about "blaming the victim" or anything. Life does suck sometimes, and some people certainly are dealt shitty hands. I just think that you can only take the hand you start from, and then make the best of it through conscious choice and effort.

And as somebody who grew up dirt poor in rural southeast NC, living below the poverty line for large swathes of time in my life, I've literally been through this. I could have accepted my lot in life as a poor, uneducated, country bumpkin, but I refused to do it. I couldn't control that my parents weren't wealthy, or that our public schools weren't great, or that my dad never graduated high-school and was basically illiterate. But I could control my actions, by choosing to spend my time in the library studying instead of hanging out behind the school playing handball and smoking weed... After high-school I could control choosing to work 3rd shift, buffing and waxing floors at a grocery story, then getting off work at 7am to drive 35 miles to be in class at 8:00. Believe me, Discrete Math at 8:00am when you've been up all night is no fun. And then going and sleeping on a couch in the library for an hour or two before your afternoon classes, that's no fun either. But I made a choice that I didn't want to be a poor, uneducated country bumpkin, so I made the sacrifices I had to make.

I could have gone out on dates, went bowling with my friends, gone to football games, and thousands of other things... but night after night after night I sat home alone with a stack of C and C++ books, downloading code from BBS's (and later, the Internet), learning to code and honing my skills.

It wasn't easy and there were tradeoffs (there is a reason I never got married and had kids, for example), but I got out of redneckville and have gone on to have a pretty decent career, and now I am the founder of a startup that has some real potential.

So, yeah, put me in the camp of people who do put a lot of stock in the idea of "individual empowerment", because I've experienced it firsthand.