Deconstructing luck, fate and other happenings

You flip tails with a coin 7 times in a row. A bird pooped on you this morning. You feel like a perfect match for someone because of all these strange commonalities and coincidences. That's luck. When it's a series of fortunate happenings, you bask in its glory wondering what you ever did to deserve it. However when it's a downpour of missed trains, missed opportunities, lost connections, it's a giant black cloud that hovers over your shoulder.

The truth is that we're looking at it all wrong. We need to take a step back to see the bigger picture. It's our nature to seek patterns in our everyday happenings, trying to make sense of randomness. However, attributing strings of good or bad events to luck just gives luck too much credit. Take the three scenarios I started out with- they are all missing critical information to make a complete judgment. You need to know the full population of tries to determine if the result really beat the odds. Flipping tails 7 times in a row is a lucky occurrence if you only flipped a coin 10 times, but if you flipped it 100 times, the probability of 7 tails shoots up drastically. That bird poop is not quite the lucky occurrence if you walk outside frequently enough. And the perfect match feeling is just your fuzzy focus when you actually like someone. Most likely, if you recall that first date, he liked the Mets and you hated baseball, he liked barbeque and you preferred any other cuisine, he liked mindless comedies and you liked indie flicks. It took you several mis-matches to land on those few commonalities and coincidences. The bigger problem is our selective memories, and how skewed things get when you let a few moments define the way we think.

In our search for consistency, patterns, and fortunate happenings, we can't always trust our memories. I know that, and I'll apply it if I feel like I'm sinking into wishy washy concepts of luck and fate. Despite that, I still believe in perfect, serendipidous moments. It's the simple moments, stripped of grand gestures, that really let you catch a glimpse of who someone is and who they can be. (Just don't forget moments are only perfect because they are short.)

Inspiration- Radiolab's Stochasticity Podcast