It's your lucky day

There is something very comforting, I believe, in knowing that just about everyone else everywhere else in the world is in the same boat you are: you wake up one day and you're here and have to see your way through to the end. It can instill a sense of shared responsibility, or common fate, or a host of other feelings and ideals that could be of great value to all of us, if we were but to recognize them.

There is, however, a darker side to this as well.

When I woke up, it was in the middle of the 20th century in a small town in Western Pennsylvania. My wife woke up a little ahead of me, but six time zones to the east, in a small village near the geographical center of Germany, which was trying to dig itself out and rehabilite itself after a long and ugly war. I know a guy who woke up in a country to the southeast of my wife, a country that doesn't even exist anymore. I have a friend who woke up in time to experience Mao's Cultural Revolution.

What we have in common is of great value, to be sure, but what all us have recognized in the meantime is that we had very different starting points for trying to figure out our way through to the end. They were very, very different from one another, and I think it is safe to say they were -- and are -- very unequal. Does it matter?

There are many of you, I'm certain, who simply blurted out, "Well, no, not at all.", but I would caution you to restrain your enthusiasm for a moment and reflect on this a moment.

Here's the question: to what can (or should) we attribute the fact that we all have different starting points, unequal starting points? The answer to this question is, I believe, much more important than you may realize at first blush. How did I end up in the US, my wife in Germany, an acquaintance in Yugoslavia, and a friend in China? Yes, how? The answer is, however, rather simple, it just happened to turn out that way, it was some kind of accident, it was simply a matter of the luck of the draw.

Unless you have a convincing theory about how children are made and end up with their particular parents (or not) in a particular place at particular time, and if you are not willing to take the mythological step toward fate (which you would also have to convincingly justify), then I'm afraid you have little more left to fall back on than plain dumb luck.

What interests me most about this is how luck (of any kind) plays as good as no role in explaining anything about people. Oh, sure, you can say that you have to deal with the cards you're dealt, but to value one person higher (who really had an easier go of it) than some other (who made his or her way through circumstances that might have killed Mr or Ms Successful) just because they didn't "succeed", appears to me to something of an arbitrary call.

What also interests me is not just this first luck of the draw, but in reality just how many successes do we have in this world whose success is or could be primarily attributed to luck more than any other reason (such as ambition, talent, intelligence, and all the other things we like to attribute ourselves with)? My guess would be that there are many more than we might like to acknowledge.