A lot of people who are confident, if you look at their life it was filled with friendships, family connections and receiving validation. Stable shelter and safety. They think they’re superior and are treated as such, but I think it’s often just that their circumstances are better, so it’s easy for them to be confident and appear strong – there’s a lack of hardship and an abundance of the resources humans need (food, water, shelter, safety, freedom, human connection).
I recently experienced sleeping on the streets for a month, and that shit was pretty easy for me to handle (props to food charities too). My third day a worker at a homelessness place told me “this’ll probably be the most stressful thing you’ve gone through” and I said “yeh maybe”, but it turned out to be nowhere near true, for me. Yet I wouldn’t be considered strong. But I think if you took a lot of strong people and chucked them on the street, they’d struggle much more or even off themselves. Same thing if you take a popular, confident person and make them have no friends – my best friend was always quite unpopular, whereas his brother was popular and more confident. His brother got bullied a little and lost some of his popularity (but still had a group of friends) and got majorly depressed and tried to suicide and became very unconfident, despite still being more popular than my friend.