Life is Mostly About Luck

Humans have very fragile perceptions. The reason being is that evolution did not design us to be perfect evaluating machines with impeccable memories and swift responses. We are the way we are because the environment is constantly changing. It is chaotic. This is why a bush moving is most likely to indicate an animated entity rather being the wind. This is why we would rather step back instead of putting our hand in to check out. This is also how religion came to be. We are be safe than sorry.

For this reason we believe we are at the center of it all. Everything. We like to think that our actions matter more than those beside us. If something good occurs it was all because of us. If something bad happens, it was because of other people and bad luck. Humans like to form narratives, yet, narratives have nothing to do with reality. Narratives only shape our own perception about reality.

One would beg to ask. "Isn't randomness and statistics just another narrative?". It could be perceived as such but I would like to believe that if one steps back from it all - and I mean mean step back as far as the Moon - and look back at Earth, everything will make sense. If one steps back even further, lets say Andromeda galaxy, things will make even more sense.

Life on earth is just an occurrence of randomness. We are the survivorship-bias. Nowhere in other planets can we witness another form of life. For this reason we like to think that our random molecular entities are more special and deserve greater attention. Narrowing down our perception from planet Earth, to our city, our company, our family, the same narrative remains. We are the important ones and the entire world revolves around us.

We created religion and faith to propagate this concept in our communities. It took over everything around us. In the corporate world religious figures took the form of Tony Robins. The Bibles became books like "The Secret". Again, we are at the center of it all and our actions matter so that we can achieve and things that we so wish - whatever those might be.

The reality is that life is random. Extremely random. One event, good or bad, can snowball us into delusion that every action we took changed the world around us. We neglect to take into account the butterfly effect. How a signature from a politician can change the way some factories work. How some of those CEOs will react and how that will impact a father of three that just happened to sit in the coffee shop for an extra 5 minutes which resulted him getting hit by car the moment he walked out. While all these things where happening literally trillions of other events influenced the event I just described. Yet, almost everyone would think that the worker controls his destiny and that it was his "bad attitude" that unleashed the fury of his boss getting him fired.

The cancer of society is nothing more than this blind faith that we are at the center of it all. Our fear to accept entropy. Our denial to admit that control is just an illusion. So what do we do? We follow the 0.001% that just happened to be lucky. The lottery winners. And we take advice from them in order to follow the same their steps so we can have the things they media advertise us that they have. "10 things rich people do", " 5 things the president does every day". And we believe it because at heart we are religious. Because otherwise we might as well shoot ourselves.

You might had a dream one day to be an astronaut or become a New Yorker or or or. Along that dream you also had other dreams. As entropy unfolded some of those dreams started becoming less foggy and some others clearer. Suddenly there was a tipping point that went unnoticed. Something emerged and you became convinced that this was something you already striven for. The brain is designed to forget the misses and remember the "hits". And there you are, gloating that it was your grit and persistence that made it all happen. And nothing, absolutely nothing can change your mind. Your brain wouldn't want to have it any other way.