>'There's definitely some kind of genetic factor at play, and some kind of environmental factor.' Absolutely. >'The real question is, can you take somebody wh

>'There's definitely some kind of genetic factor at play, and some kind of environmental factor.' Absolutely. >'The real question is, can you take somebody who could objectively be described as a failure at life and train them/educate them/psychotherapy them into changing their decision tree to seek success instead of immediate gratification?' My armchair theory on this says yes. Yes, as much as you can train/educate/psych the underlying problems which lead to the broken decisions. I think we can consider broken decision making process for life choices as a single symptom manifesting from mental processes that are 'out of spec' which may or may not be recognized as specific illnesses. I tend to think of most everything mental as a continuum. A million analog variables with all sorts of dependencies and feedback loops producing the color of a person and we're holding up a handful of Pantone swatches trying to figure out which matches to determine what they 'have'. Big problem is, I think there's a fairly limited window on these things an incomplete understanding of what all the various dials do (nurture) and even less about how they interrelate (nature). Ideally, you're trained and educated within your childhood bubble by your parents, siblings, relatives or some other 'safe' person. Then, suddenly the instinct and extended social contract of 'help kids, don't hurt them' falls away completely and any sort of training becomes far harder as this person is suddenly fair game to be exploited or discarded. That's not exactly how I wanted any of that to come out, but I didn't want to leave genuine discussion hanging.