I'd love to debate with you on this. I've worked with people in the past that have been kicked in the face repeatedly by those that should bring them up and not slap them down. I always see that glint in their eye, that potential, that something waiting for me to grab hold of inside of them and make it shine. If one was shat on for most of their life, and going by what you just said, wouldn't it hold true that they would just be happy to exist? I'm not too sure, I see that glint in a few people I meet.
On the other hand I sort of disagree with myself. I knew there was something more for me by having an extended family that lived far better lives than we did. So I knew for certain there was better out there. I don't know. What are your ideas? I was a council estate kid getting drunk and smoking dope in my teens. I had no interest in Politics, or anything for that matter, apart from my next hit!
Well, there is no generic rule of the kind of "people who go through hardships or get rejected are more likely to be happy where they are", but there is an important factor to note here and this is the comparison factor.
The human mind puts things on perspective based on comparisons. You might have noticed people who were born and raised in poor communities of Africa or Asia, for example, that they seem to be smiling all the time. This is because most people in their community are more or less equally poor. People that are unhappy with their current financial (or other) situation are people who are surrounded by people who are, or are considered to be, better off. A person who makes 90K per year is rich and lucky for the standards of a lower middle class community, but he will consider himself to have failed if he lives between millionaires.
We tend to fall in a form of survivorship bias, a logical error of concentrating on people or things that are successful and compare ourselves to them only, completely forgetting about the ones that have failed due to their lack of visibility. Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes it well in his book Fooled by Randomness (he makes excellent points by the way - I recommend reading his books) in the following example.
You might have seen people who lived better and subconsciously compared yourself to them or wanted to somehow reach them. You might have had enough trouble as a kid to turn you into an independent and restless person as a means to keep coming up with ways to survive on your own. There is definitely more than one single clear influence, it's always a combination, complicated enough to make each person who ever existed on earth, unique.
Another point I would like to make: Being dissatisfied with our current state and constantly striving for something better is what allowed us to survive as a species, but in this case it's not always the best for our emotional stability. Appreciating what one has, even the small things, does not necessarily equal to them being sheep. Similarly, always living with the anxiety of becoming successful does not mean that one is a leader. It often just means they care too much to prove themselves. The key to living a happy life is for people to go their own way without comparing themselves to others. One has to find a balance between being too content to be bothered to change anything in this world, and being too dissatisfied to be able to appreciate anything because the neighbor has it better.
I actually agree with everything you said there. It makes total sense really.
I feel really content with what I have, I feel happy that my efforts in life have blessed me with a really comfortable lifestyle. That doesn't mean I'm content to stay the same as I am though. I'm always looking for better. Whilst this Steemit platform writing is going well for me I've just hired a marketing agency to thrust my website into the limelight and start seeing some well needed sales. I will always strive for better, and I will always appreciate what I have, because I know that it could go southward at any moment :)
When I started to strive I always felt I had something to prove, I always felt that I needed to best my friends at what they were doing because almost always I was the one lagging behind. Now I feel I have nothing more to prove because my friends are eons behind, but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop! I'm also certainly never going to forget where I came from and the toxic mindsets that lead into that system!