On Luck

An essay I wrote quite a while ago but neglected to put up on the blog. Considering my current predicament, I felt that I needed to write something to accurately reflect my views on the situation. However, that turned out to be quite difficult and I produced this rather unusual essay instead. I think it captures my positive mindset well, so hopefully people will find it reassuring and an interesting to boot. About 2,500 words.

On Luck

Luck is, in a way, a very sensible and logical idea to believe in, in a similar way to God. The classic teleological argument* regarding God – things appear to have a purpose and purpose has to be given by something – makes sense. Everything humans have created, no matter how poorly, has been created with a purpose, no matter how trivial or how successful the thing is at fulfilling its purpose. So when we discover purpose in other objects not made by humans we attribute their existence to a higher creation. Sensible and logical. Luck is similar because it appears that some people are more successful in life than others, often through their own merits but also not. When people see others undeservedly succeed, or succeed without effort and application on their part, they feel this success must be rationalised in some way – and the guiding hand of fate appears to be a way of explaining someone’s success.

Most people can see that these ideas fall down on the very thing that makes them stand – it is human rationality that creates the belief of purpose or guided design, but that does not make the belief true or real. This means that we can create purpose in objects. It is through our understanding of objects that we interpret their purpose, free of God but attributable to him (if you so wish). Trees, rocks and sand may have been used for making shelter but that’s a purpose that we have attributed to them. It does not come from God thinking ‘Humans are going to need somewhere to live. I’ll leave lots of resources around that can be used to construct buildings. Then they can make a construction for me and visit it once a week to say thank you.’ No, God would have made houses for us all to live in. Even then, it requires humans to develop a purpose for the house. Ultimately, a lot of the order or purpose that is found in the world exists because humans find things easier to understand when ordered and purposeful. This interpretation of order can lead to supernatural and superstitious conclusions.

When it comes to luck we can see that, once again, our minds, so suited to rationality and order (quite a generous thing to say of humans), struggle to believe that a sequence of coincidences can fit together without a specified order or guide. This guiding hand is something we describe as luck, fate, karma and so on. But really that is humankind regimenting the random again. To understand why things happen, it is simplest to create a guide – again, to rely on the supernatural and superstitious.

It is also comparable to how people confuse evolution as something guided rather than simply progressive. People often treat evolution, God and luck as if they all have consciousness. However, no such luck. In essence, I follow the sentiments of the Willie Dixon-penned song that was so eloquently revamped by Megadeth**: “And I ain't superstitious/No such thing as bad luck/And I ain't superstitious/I couldn't really give a fuck/Take your stupid superstitions/Find some other paranoidal, chickenshit, sissy, worm, and tell it to him.” Well, maybe it is not eloquent but it certainly makes the point.

Luck is a string of coincidences that make up life. Good luck is when these coincidences fall in a surprising and beneficial way. This can be seen in gambling. A roulette wheel is meant to be a game of chance and it is when the chances consistently fall positively on a person’s bet or on a particularly large bet that we can call that person ‘lucky’. If someone, however, faces consistent negative coincidences or suffers a notably horrible coincidence, that someone will be called ‘unlucky’. And that is correct because that is our interpretation but it is not the reality of the situation as ‘is’. In other words, there are no ‘lucky’ or ‘unlucky’ people, there is only stuff that happens and is interpreted.

One tale of fortune that I recall back from my FHM*** reading days (head in hands at such a confession – I was an FHM reader, I admit it!) was a man that had been arrested and put on trial in an oppressive and quite brutal country. I cannot recall his crime but I do recall the sentence. The man was made to put his back to a wall that was then knocked over and driven across by a great, big tank. I probably recollect this ridiculous punishment because the man survived! Supposedly, there was barely a scratch on him. Furthermore, as the punishment was carried out, he had served his sentence and was a free man! That is clearly an extreme coincidence and we cannot deny the man’s good fortune at getting through such an ordeal. However, we must not give too much weight for this man’s ‘good luck’ for numerous reasons, most of them obvious.

By contrast, I have also read of people’s great misfortune. This man’s plight has been ably described by cracked.com:

“Roy Sullivan was struck by lightning. Seven times. Statistically, getting hit by lightning is a three-thousand to one chance. Therefore getting hit seven times is about twenty-two septillion to one. That's 22,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. To 1. “

It is fair to say most people would consider this man’s consistent coincidences to fit in the unlucky category. But once again, he cannot be considered to be actually blessed or cursed – unless he has been cursed with a biological defect that reduces the odds to ten-one. Regardless, he is not ‘unlucky’ but is interpreted as such.

I have had plenty of good fortune in my life. One example that springs to mind brings me back to gambling and the roulette wheel. The finer details are not important but I was at a casino and not doing very well. In fact, I’d lost – for me – a notable sum of money, which meant I was not going to have much of a night out. So, in frustrated desperation, I put my remaining money on one number. This being a tale of good luck, I think you can guess what happened. I was up higher than I started and I went on to acquire a little more before having a big drinking session! When hope was at its lowest, Lady Luck graced me. Except she didn’t. It is a set of neutral coincidences that I interpret as positive.

However, I have also experienced some things that I would describe as unlucky. This encourages me to recall a time when my leg was wrapped up because it had been horrifically burnt. That was not bad luck – that was stupidity. On this night, at a friend’s house, my leg had just got over an infection in the burn and was about to begin its healing process. But, also on this night, my girlfriend of the time broke up with me over the phone. I wasn’t very happy with this. I had now been burned twice. I went for a walk down to the end of my friend’s garden to have some ‘alone time’ and to calm myself down with some relief. Upon walking back up to the house, in the dark, I managed to not see the great big pond and put my healing leg into it. The dirty water meant my leg was again infected. Those are two nasty things to happen to someone and people might say it is unfair, unlucky even, that my leg got infected the day a girlfriend decided to crap over my feelings.

However, this is not a tale of misfortune and, really, there should be some blame attributed here. If I hadn’t burnt my leg in the first place, if I hadn’t acted in such a way to anger the lady I was seeing, if I had not resorted to drunkenly masturbating at the bottom of a garden and if I had put the outside light on, I would have been much less likely to suffer this ‘fate’. In fact, I note a lot of my ‘bad luck’ results from my own stupidity. The various scars I have acquired, the arrests and the financial stresses I have gone through and the experiences I’ve missed out on can all be put down to some very simple finger-pointing. Here, it seems that these things have been, not coincidences, but rather consequences.

This is an unusual and important point: the great things that happen to me – having a job I enjoy a lot, where I am surrounded by people I find absolutely lovely; a great circle of friends; an almost-clichéd perfect, loving family – I believe as all being ‘good luck’ and not of consequences, even though I so clearly conclude the opposite in theory. I therefore have to agree with the playwright Tennessee Williams^ when he says “Luck is believing that you’re lucky.”

I do feel that I am a very lucky individual for the reasons mentioned above (not the trivial gambling one, the ones that are important to life). So even though I do not believe in luck I do believe I’m lucky because I interpret the few bad things as things I am responsible for (mostly) and the good things as things I am not. In essence, I think this comes from the fact that I am, generally speaking, a very happy and positive person. To be cheerful, ‘fortunately’, is my natural attitude and this is most important when it comes to interpreting my fate as negative or positive. It’s that tired, old saying ‘is the glass half empty, or is it half full?’

It is much better to think of luck as not being active in a person’s life and consequences much more involved. Jefferson^^, apparently, said “I am a great believer in luck and I find the harder I try, the more I have of it.” Yes, another cliché, we make our own luck. Luck can stop us striving towards goals by making us lazy or complacent, or it can make us disheartened. Thus we should generally keep the idea of luck out of our minds and focus on consequences and actions. Another quote, this time from Buddha: “Being deeply learned and skilled, being trained and using well-spoken words: this is good luck.” Our lives are what we make of them. We are the makers of our own destiny through how we decide to live.

This brings me to my last point. As someone who was statistically very unlikely to get leukaemia (and as someone who was even less likely to experience the type of leukaemia I have^^^) at a point where it has stopped me from starting a new job and where it will likely keep me cooped up for at least six months of my life, I do not feel unlucky. Even though those small odds may leave me being in and out of hospital and potentially battling the cancer as long as I live, I still feel pretty good. I do not deny that I am going through something that most people would consider a ‘rough patch’ but I also cannot deny all the good things I still have around me. My health may have taken a knock but all the good fortune I mentioned earlier remains very much a constant in my life. If anything, the experiences I have had throughout this recent ordeal have only emphasised how lucky I am. The number of people that have offered their support and the magnitude of their love and care has filled me only with the emotions of gratitude and happiness. Though I have ‘unluckily’ been diagnosed with a very serious illness, the only thing I can think of is how ‘lucky’ I am. I feel there’s no better way to be (though, that is not why I have this positive mentality). The feelings may seem somewhat unusual, or even counter-intuitive, but I cannot deny my contented state of being. Another anecdote I recall is of a man who thought he was so lucky and his life so perfect that he donated a kidney. He did this not out of any altruistic gesture or gratitude for his good fortune but because he could not accept living a life hardship-free. Apparently, it is some kind of mental condition.῀ Maybe I am suffering a similar form of dementia, sitting on a hospital bed with cancer and thinking how lucky I am? Or maybe I am genuinely lucky to feel so good about life? I will leave you with a quote on this matter by a man that greatly influenced Chomsky (though largely in his linguistic works), Wilhelm Von Humboldt:

“It is usually more important how a man meets his fate than what it is.”

Notes:

*: According to dictionary.com, one of the definitions of teleology is ‘the study of evidences of design or purpose in nature.’ The teleological argument then concludes that, where there is evidence of design, there is evidence of a designer (normally called God).

**:‘I Ain’t Superstitious’ was originally performed by Howlin’ Wolf, apparently, and was released by the classic Chess Records. There is a recording of the song that includes legends such as Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr and many others. Megadeth, the thrash legends, combined the blues original with their own brand of thrash and frustration – hence, Dave Mustaine’s (Megadeth mastermind) ridiculously hostile lyrics.

***: FHM, or ‘For Him Magazine’, is a ‘lad’s mag’ – seriously soft-core porn that tries to present itself as being a less base form of entertainment. I used to read it every month without fail, from about 14 for about 2 and a half years. I used to properly read it too – cover to cover – while most my friends were using it for its primary purpose – adolescent wank-fodder. It is only with hindsight I can see what trash it was/is. Still, at least it wasn’t Nuts.

^: Tennessee Williams wrote ‘A Street Car named Desire’, ‘A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ and ‘The Glass Menagerie’ amongst others. Most people would have seen one of his plays or read it at school. I read ‘The Glass Menagerie’ and I don’t think I thought much of it. ‘A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ was good, though.
^^: Thomas Jefferson said many a sensible thing including the quote above. I’ll also add these – if only Americans took heed:

“Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”

“Conquest is not in our principles. It is inconsistent with our government.”

“Delay is preferable to error.”
^^^: A doctor mentioned that I’m an unlikely 1 in 200 of people to contract this type of leukaemia in the UK, over the last ten years. Apparently.

῀: I have no evidence for this one – I may have made it up or have been lied to.