1524 May Luck Be With You

Most people don’t comprehend, nor even want to know, how much luck controls their lives. Almost everything they do, their entire path is life, is almost certainly luck with a little bit of intent and effort nudging the ball, like in a pinball machine, except less controlled. There’s no other way to explain why some people are undeservedly successful while others are undeserved failures. In the past, when science was mysticism, luck was interpreted as God’s will. Another explanation was karma: that people got what they gave. That concept actually serves as a good catchall because most people can make up reasons in their head to justify anything: “Joe’s cow died because he yelled at his wife yesterday.” Destiny is another commonly held belief: that you have no free agency and all of your actions were assigned to you before you were born. Most of history is one kind of these excuses or the other because who wants to think you are alone, no one cares, and what happens to you is random, as it is for everybody else. However, wishing people luck is an acknowledgment of subconscious understanding. In modern times, children are taught “May the force be with you,” which is a tacit recognition that some force controls your life besides you, wrapped in a secular narrative aimed at children. They are being introduced to and entertained by the idea that most people are pawns and only those with special powers can change the world, and those people are born with it. That means that a regular person is at the mercy of powers he can’t understand and has no control over. They probably don’t recognize it as random chance but that’s what it is. The only alternative is that we all live in a simulation, and all of this is preprogrammed, meaning our lives aren’t real, and neither are we.