50 Unfortunate Souls Who Are Already Having A Worse 2024 Than You

"When such things happen to us, we have to fight the thought that the universe has conspired against us. Only once we come to terms with its indifference do we realize that we have only ourselves to rely on.

"In the face of difficulty, those who maintain a positive attitude and don't let themselves be defined by a negative event end up feeling and doing best in the long run," psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert, who's worked in a hospital emergency department, academia, a corporate setting, and even did a brief stint at the FBI before going into private practice, told Bored Panda.

"Know that you are bigger and stronger than one rejection or a negative situation," the author of 'Be Fearless: Change Your Life in 28 Days' added.

Bloomsburg University philosophy professor Steven Hales agrees that luck is a matter of perspective.

For one of his studies, Hales and experimental psychologist Jennifer Johnson tested the hypothesis that optimists are more likely to see other people's experiences as lucky, while pessimists focus on misfortune in the same set of facts.

They used real-life stories of "ambiguous luck"—for instance, a Japanese man who survived the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, practically unscathed, and lived a long life, and an American soldier who had a rocket-propelled grenade, which did not explode, lodged in his abdomen. Both men survived horrific experiences, which makes them lucky—unless you think that the fact that bad things happened to them at all makes them unlucky.

To assess the relationship between personality traits and perceptions of fortune, Hales and Johnson gave study participants a commonly used psychological assessment called the Life Orientation Test. With this, the researchers determined the extent to which subjects were optimists or pessimists.

The participants then rated the luck of people in ambiguous real-life stories as unlucky, somewhat unlucky, somewhat lucky, or lucky.

The researchers found "a significant positive correlation" between the subjects' level of optimism and how lucky they thought others were.

"One of the things this means is that the more optimistic you are, the more you think others are lucky. If you are more of a pessimist, you’re likelier to see others as suffering bad luck,” Hales wrote.

But while luck is subjective, uncertainty isn't and it follows us every day.

"Certainty provides predictability and the feeling of control. When we aren't sure how things will go and what the outcomes [are going to be], our brains tend to create endings as a way to gain control," Jonathan Alpert explained. "The problem with this sometimes is that it is not always accurate."

"For example, a boy wants to ask a girl out on a date, and because he's uncertain, his mind goes to the worst possible outcome (a girl like her will never say yes to a guy like me). This then affects his confidence, creates anxiety, and leads to overall discomfort."

The solution, according to Alpert, is to "stick to what you know to be true and what you actually have control over."

In the boy's case, he has no idea that the girl will say no, so he has full control over how he conducts himself and what he says but not the response he receives.

So even if life throws you a curveball similar to the ones in these pictures, try to "stick with fact over fiction and what you have control over," Alpert suggested.

"For example, you can't control the weather but you can control how you deal with it or prepare for it, e.g. bring an umbrella!"