Daily bread 05/26/2024

• What we gain by recognising the role of chance in life | Psyche Ideas

  • Appreciating the world is random can foster perseverance, gratitude for our own luck and empathy for the plight of others
  • many of us still believe that our fortunes can be engineered
  • Luck plays an ungovernable and unpredictable role in our lives, which we can’t fully mitigate through preparation or diligence
  • ‘gambler’s fallacy’
  • we find it hard to reconcile the difference between the odds of large and small numbers
  • We like to believe in balance
  • we like to believe the world is just and fair
  • Chance and luck have little interest in our notions of balance and deservedness
  • In life, bad things can happen to good people, and good things can happen to bad people
  • Accidents take place, illnesses strike, and unlucky breaks occur indiscriminately
  • the randomness of the universe is blind to any sense of justice
  • we should not deceive ourselves into believing that the world is always fair.
  • It is simply a matter of chance – of fortuitous luck.
  • Rather than searching for blame or a causal reason, randomness can relieve us from such a burden
  • Many decisions affecting us involve some element of randomness and luck and these decisions may have little to do with our abilities or credentials
  • We cannot control randomness and chance, but we can increase the odds that chance will shine in our favour by increasing the number of opportunities for a particular result to play out
  • Recognising and accepting chance and luck also fosters a heightened sense of gratitude
  • This is reflected in the saying ‘count your blessings’, but is slightly different in that it recognises the precariousness of those blessings
  • can help us develop a greater sense of both humility regarding our own accomplishments and empathy for the plight of others
  • This splashes cold water on the belief that we live in a world of strict meritocracy where we deserve all that comes our way
  • By recognising the ubiquitousness of chance in our lives, we are in a much better position to empathise with the misfortunes of others.
  • We can begin to see the world as it is, rather than how we imagined it to be.

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