Does adversity make a person stronger?

This is just a roundabout way of saying that adverse circumstances can make someone stronger. If the adversity encourages the desire to overcome, thereby making you stronger, then the adversity made you stronger.

I wish it made me stronger. I seem to respond to adversity by going "yeah, okay".

Obviously, I need someone to kill everyone I know and love, drag me to their giant grain wheel and force me to push it around for about twenty years.

Dan Eile: There's a difference between adversity MOTIVATING you to become stronger, and adversity actually RESULTING in you being stronger (rather than weaker), and I specifically wrote that sentence to state that there IS a difference between the two.

I know, I read that. But if that motivation then causes you to work to become stronger, can you really say that the adversity was not a cause?

To give an analogy; if a person is made fun of for being overweight, which causes them to want to get fit, leading to that person getting fit; couldn't you say that the mockery - itself a motivating factor - has a causal link to the result?

edited 7th May '11 2:44:54 AM by DanEile

Nope. I don't feel that the mockery made the overweight person stronger (having BEEN overweight for 13 years of my life, I'd know). The mockery probably made them want to curl up and die most of the time, if not outright take a bat to the people mocking them. Adversity is probably at best an indirect cause of someone becoming stronger, in my opinion. Mockery doesn't make people stronger, even if it motivates someone to become stronger.

I can't possibly get behind the idea of adversity directly making someone stronger (even if I'm fine with it motivating someone to get stronger), simply because then that would mean people would heap abuse on other people (moreso than usual) with the whole "It'll make you stronger!" or "It'll build character!" (or both) fallacy.

I don't feel that it's adversity that makes a person stronger, it's how they deal with it.

Well, to explain the analogy, that overweight person was me. I didn't enjoy being made fun of, but it made me take up running and exercising at the age of the 15, to the point where I can comfortably say at 20 that I'm quite fit.

I would actually credit my bullies with giving me the motivating force to turn my life around. I sure don't get bullied now, I'll tell you that much. It's harsh, but true.

To take a legal perspective on it; think of it like provocation: Say someone does something so terrible to you that it makes you want to kill them. That person's act then forms part of the chain of causation, so that if you do kill them in a fit of passion, your crime is not murder but manslaughter. However, if something else happens between their act and your killing of them; which breaks the chain of causation (known as a novus actus interveniens) then your killing of them would be murder. A loose comparison, but relevant for the chain of causation.

Also, note that I'm not advocating people being bullied to "build character", that's ludicrous. But a little adversity does in fact build character. You don't get strong people from a life of mollycoddling. I can say that with a degree of certainty because my mother, whom I love dearly, coddled me most of my life. When I got to secondary school, I was shocked to find that not everyone was lovely all of the time. And I didn't know how to cope with that. That was my real education, I think.

edited 8th May '11 12:28:15 AM by DanEile

Facing adversity - and more importantly, recovering from said adversity - tends to leave a person better equipped to handle future hardships. Hard times usually change people's personalities, and if they haven't been hit with a blow from which they will never recover, I'd say that change is mostly for the best.

I'm providing an example based on Internet drama, since I'm so very fond of that: Take, for example, a somewhat misguided young person with strong but questionable opinions on politics, philosophy and religion. If he were to engage some people with more thought-out views on these subjects and broader world-views, they might be more or less harsh in their choice of wording and thus, perhaps, direct a harsh blow at a teenager's self-esteem. That might force him to reconsider his beliefs and, through a failure at defending his position at an argument, lead him to construct better arguments in the future. Had he not faced this adversity, he would continue to hold his questionable, black-and-white opinions.

edited 7th May '11 7:20:43 PM by Onions

This shouldn't even be a question, it totally does. It's like when we get a shitload of EXP in Video Games when we defeat enemies way stronger than us.

edited 7th May '11 11:35:20 PM by KShade

You know, that does seem to make sense...

I think "adversity" should be defined at this point, because I still see it differently than "challenge".

I'd define adversity as "a difficult or unpleasant situation". Or perhaps "opposition to oneself or one's views". Which, logically speaking, would be a challenge to overcome.

edited 8th May '11 3:36:24 AM by DanEile