Rough lives can recover, one issue at a time

This is about somebody I've written about in this post in the past.

My outlook on life was altered after knowing them. The world is a terrible place for a lot of people, I realized, they're dealt a one bad hand after another, and not told the rules of the game, not given the tools to figure it out, and left to fend for themselves. When they can't figure things out because everything is stacked against them, they are punished harshly, which leads them to strange conclusions about the nature of reality, it's an unending circle of awful existence and terrible decisions. Or so I thought.

I'm reconsidering that worldview.

It appears that things can and will change, for the better, for incredibly good turns, one issue at a time. If you've been handed a hundred different awful hands, one day you notice you're getting favorable plays in one game. And you leverage winnings from it to increase your chance of win in a different play, and so on and on. It's not linear growth or improvement obviously but the trend is clear: people having a better set of tools and experiences to deal with life than they started with.

Rough lives can recover, they do that all the time, and if one desires, one can turn their lives upside down for the better. Warms my heart, that what could be considered irrecoverable can change.

Hope is the king, cynicism leads to death and decay, it seems.