[m463]

I've learned the most about life from "character building experiences". They are usually unpleasant. They could be as simple as somone telling you not to be stupid, or as complicated as finding lessons out the hard way.

The experiences give you the resolve or clues or whatever to avoid bad choices, or appreciate good ones. Or help others understand (if they're receptive).

[ido]

It could! And it can also fuck you up for life.

My grandfather was a teenager during WW2. He was a Polish Jew and lucky to have seen the writing on the wall and fled eastwards when the Nazis invaded (almost the entire rest of his large family died in the holocaust - his only living relative was his brother, who died as a soldier in 1948 in the Israeli war of independence).

He had a horrible time during the war but eventually found safety as a refugee in the soviet union (after they put him to 2 years of forced labor in a coal mine). He met my grandmother in the Ukraine & together they fled to Uzbekistan where my mother was born a few months after the end of the war.

He used to say that during those time he fantasied about owning/operating a flour mill after the war, so that he could always bake bread and never be hungry.

He had a psychotic episode in the 70s and was put on medication that he continued taking his entire life afterwards. He was a deeply harsh, grumpy & unhappy person the entire time I knew him (roughly the last 20 years of his life). According to what my mother told me about her & my uncle's upbringing he would also be considered a terrible father these days (due to his own emotional/psychic state no doubt).

So I would personally put a strong recommendation against experiencing extreme hardships in order to "build character" - I rather my character remain unbuilt than experience war, genocide & forced labor camps.

[badpun]

Pretty much the same story here. My granda was a Polish teenager who got thrown into Stallinist right prison after surviving 5 years of German WWII occupation. I think the abuse there pretty much wrecked his psyche for life, with signs of mental illness and a pretty miserable character in general afterwards.

[Diederich]

Thanks for sharing; see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21595320

[WalterBright]

I tentatively agree that character isn't built by extreme hardships. But I do suspect that being shot at would determine what kind of a man you are, and there's no way to know that in advance.

For example, being a navigator, my father sat up front behind the bombardier. There's a plexiglass hemisphere in the nose. The Me-109's favorite attack plan was the head on attack (because the B-17's had a gap in coverage in the front). He said you can see the cannon flash as they fired at him (usually aiming for the pilots, who were right behind my father's position, thinking "how can they miss".

What would you do in such a situation? Nobody can tell in advance.

[Diederich]

Thank you for sharing this.

It seems obvious that living and pushing through real hardships can have highly variable impacts on people, depending on the person and the circumstances.

I suspect that one element that makes such experiences more likely to provide positive long-term impacts is perceived or real personal agency during the events in question.

If, during the difficult times, a person feels like they have some material influence over the outcome, and then the outcome is neutral or good, then it's more likely that the whole mess will end up being a net positive life influence.

What do you think?

[ido]

Yeah, that sounds plausible but I'm not sufficiently educated about the research in the area of PTSD and other long term responses to trauma.

[m463]

I'm sorry to hear this story. Maybe the idea is to temper the character, maybe test it but not break it.