How do you know?
Because I spent many, many years around such people, and I certainly know about living it, for better or worse. When bad things happen to most people, it is a transient condition and they climb out of whatever hole they find themselves in. A very big fraction of those who find themselves perpetually in a hole are so for myriad of reasons mostly under their control.
This has generally been a feature of poverty: few that genuinely put effort into it stay in poverty, and for those that do stay in poverty, you do not have to be around them very long to know why. This makes it a self-selecting population. Those who claim it is beyond their control or not their fault are precisely the people who find themselves in that situation because they refuse to accept any responsibility for it. All the people that did take responsibility no longer count as "hard luck cases".
A lot of people claim they have no choice in life in the same sense that Katrina victims who refused to eat MREs for aesthetic reasons had no choice but to go hungry. People routinely and improperly conflate not liking their choices with not having choices.