If a person consistently fails in all aspects of their lives over the course of many years, they become accustomed to failing. They take comfort in being wrong. They become addicted to failure. Eventually they think they are right when they are wrong, and they think they're winners when by almost any objective measurement they are losers.
Great way to describe the beartrolls.
I even bet that when Google first launched, they kept typing for months, even years, into the search box "The internet is going to die, why bother creating this stupid search box, there's nothing interesting to find". Only the search box didn't listen.