Luck Is a Matter of Perspective

A 35 year old woman walks down the street and a pot lands on her head. She is paralyzed from the neck down. For 5 years she goes through extensive physiotherapy until she gradually starts regaining basic functionality on her hands. 10 years pass and she can now starts taking her first steps. She was insured so she never has to worry about money ever again for the remainder of her life.

A child attends a dinner with his unemployed mother. At the dinner, the child gets bored and starts drawing a red sports car on a piece of napkin using his mom lipstick. The host of the dinner notices the child's doodle. It reminds him of his childhood when he too used to draw red sports cars. The host decides to hire his mother as his advisor. The child eventually grows up to become the CEO of the host's company. His success is short-lived since he dies tragically at the age of 35 from crashing a red sports car. He had a good life.

We can post these stories in a thousand online forums and host debates about which person of the two was the luckiest. People who value long livelihood and learning through life's struggles would consider the paralyzed women lucky. In contract, those who value a life full of excitement and fast rewards would appreciate dying from living one's dream.

People would create stories about how the boy's luck came to be and whether he worked on it. Similarly, some would even suggest that the woman having the pot landing on her head was nothing but a form of paying for the past sins. At the end, the narrative people will come up with will tell us more about them rather than what actually happened in the stories.

Nature, the host of our lives, does not care how we perceive luck. The concept of luck is nothing but an illusive narrative. A young couple might find a pregnancy a curse. The same couple, and after 20 years of trying, might find it a blessing. We like to talk about how we" make our luck" and how "if you believe in yourself anything is possible". We like to remember the times we truly believed in ourselves and made something amazing happen. The event will function as proof that our "mind game system" works. We will summon religion, spiritual forces and quantum events to justify our claim. Our brains will create its own narrative because it likes to forget the times we tried as hard but all those extraordinary events never took place.

Confirmation bias is the foundation of belief. It helps us go on in a world that is immensely chaotic. Without it, most people would end up depressed and/or suicidal. Biases, such as ones perceived as good or bad luck, blinds us enough to create a convincing narrative for our story here on earth. They fuse with our culture and so they provide us with something to hold onto. Luck is nothing but a matter of perspective. Our inability to rationally calculate the innumerable probabilities that govern our lives might also be the only thing that keeps (most of) us sane.