Conflating circumstances and choices is absurd. Siegel's default wasn't the inevitable result of circumstances. It was a choice. Whatever the outcome, he can't deny agency. He can't say it was all somebody else's fault, and that he only did what he had to do. He had to do one of several things, and he chose one. Millions of people, none of them in identical circumstances but statistically close enough, made different choices and had those choices work out fine, without the life of self-loathing Siegel predicted for himself if he had chosen differently. That prediction was convenient, but ill-founded in fact.