160cmcurry
Banned
- Joined
- Jul 26, 2024
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how much environment decides everything before you even get a chance to act. the people you’re surrounded by, the standards that exist around you, whether ambition is normal or mocked. it dictates the kind of friends you’ll even be allowed to make, if any, and whether you develop forward momentum or just stagnate. i didn’t lose because i was “ugly,” lazy, or incompetent. i got dealt a bad hand because my environment was trash. people fucking you over becomes normal when the setting rewards mediocrity, resentment, and scarcity. in places like that, potential isn’t nurtured, it’s suffocated.
sometimes i just mourn my high school years because i can see now how unnecessary the damage was, how i viewed this as something ‘normal.’ it was the school. tiny, poor, no real sports team, no culture, no pipeline to anything better. no exposure, no competition, no vision, people with no future prospects.
outcomes aren’t always purely individual
people never talk about how different the trajectory is if you’re dropped into a proper, big, diverse high school. more people, more archetypes, more pathways. better social calibration. actual extracurriculars. real chances to be seen, tested, refined. environments like that don’t guarantee success, but they don’t actively sabotage you either.
when you grow up somewhere small and poor, you don’t just miss opportunities, you miss versions of yourself that never get the chance to exist
sometimes i just mourn my high school years because i can see now how unnecessary the damage was, how i viewed this as something ‘normal.’ it was the school. tiny, poor, no real sports team, no culture, no pipeline to anything better. no exposure, no competition, no vision, people with no future prospects.
outcomes aren’t always purely individual
people never talk about how different the trajectory is if you’re dropped into a proper, big, diverse high school. more people, more archetypes, more pathways. better social calibration. actual extracurriculars. real chances to be seen, tested, refined. environments like that don’t guarantee success, but they don’t actively sabotage you either.
when you grow up somewhere small and poor, you don’t just miss opportunities, you miss versions of yourself that never get the chance to exist
