The world, and in that our lives is what we make out of it. There are circumstances we cannot change and we get dealt a hand we have to work with, and these varies a lot from person to person, so our settis could be very restricted depending.
Sure there are "valiant souls" but a person is a breddy complex thing. I'm sure even if he lives up to that title in his entire life, some people he meets will definitely consider him as an asshole, and those don't have to be "bad" people.
There's this view that our existence are series trials which ennobles the soul as it goes through consecutive lives (via reincarnation). A failure means another life with different hardships.
I dunno.