I Believe in Luck

Check it out: We got another ad today! This one’s from Tovala, which wants to sell you a smart toaster oven and a bunch of ready-to-cook meals. For each one of you who clicks their link, I’ll get a dollar! Wanna check them out and let us know if it’s any good?

Floating around my apartment somewhere is an old homework sheet from Sunday school. On it you can see the tentative Hebrew script of a sixth grader as he tried to answer a set of easy questions, but the finale—the reason I’m mentioning this here, now—is in English. The homework presents a prayer, then asks, “What does this prayer mean to you?” My handwritten answer: “It doesn’t mean anything, because I don’t believe in God.”

You may not be surprised to learn that I left Hebrew school soon after, and did not have a Bar Mitzvah. I had realized I was an atheist, and I remain one to this day.

My path to atheism—and, I guess, to hell, if that’s how you think about these things—was only partly about deciding that God didn’t exist. Within a few years, certainly by the time I was in high school, my atheism had shifted to a slightly different stance. It wasn’t so much that God didn’t exist, it was that I didn’t care if there was a God or not—that the existence of an Almighty did not and would not matter to the life I was leading. For who could say which Almighty it was? Imagine you are an alien being arriving on planet Earth, and that all the inhabitants are clamoring for you to believe as they do. With nothing in your history to sway you, with no ancestral culture to refer to, how would you choose between the Gods of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Quran? Would the panoply of Hindu divinities catch your eye? Would the relative¹ peace of Buddhism attract you?

Often I imagined myself in this position, and what I realized was that I was incapable of belief in the first place. Maybe I was missing the gene for faith, or maybe I’d had it thoroughly educated out of my system. Either way, I could not imagine myself believing in religious principles of any kind, of following the guidance of any magical Lord. I can control a lot of the ways that my brain works, but not this one: I could not, cannot believe in anything.

Except, I think, one thing: I believe in luck.

Obviously, I’ve been lucky. I got lucky with my parents, first of all: They loved each other, stayed married, worked hard and worked well, treated my siblings and me kindly, and prepared us for adult life out in the world. Turning out a straight white man was a kind of luck, too—not a choice but effective armor for this nerdy, shrimpy soul who, in a different body, might have been seriously vulnerable. Those are just table stakes in the grand game of luck, but they enabled further luck down the road: They let me go to a good college, and then to Vietnam, and then to New York without a passel of worries.

But it was in all those places that luck really seemed to take hold. I made lifelong ties in Vietnam; I met my wife in New York because we had mutual friends from college. Twenty-four years ago at about this time of year, I traveled to Washington, D.C., to shoot video footage of a George W. Bush inauguration protest led by the writer Neal Pollack, and there I befriended an editor named T., at whose birthday a few years later, at the Bleecker Street bar Von, I bumped into A. and M., who became my friends and who between them are responsible for my writing for the New York Times and for getting me high-level digital-editorial jobs, including the one I have now. The only real choice I made was to take the trip to D.C., but if Al Gore had won the 2000 election, none of this would have happened. Or would it? Would the coincidences have piled up in a different but not too different way, landing me a mere step or two from where I stand today? The thing about luck is the thing about God: It’s maddeningly unknowable.

More after the jump…

Ditch the Dinner Drama

Enjoy the perfect Ponzu Salmon with a side of… let’s watch another episode. Or Filet Mignon with a side of… just booked a weekend getaway. Or delicious pineapple salsa tacos with a side of… solved the wordle in 3!!

With Tovala, you can enjoy chef-crafted meals on your terms and more time to do the things you love. Ditch the dinner drama and treat yourself:

• No more “I-overcooked-the-chicken-again” angst

• No more “Let-me-just-check-on-dinner” distractions

• No more “Hours-of-prep-before-I-get-to-eat” agony

• Just home-cooked meals, ready in 20 minutes

Try Tovala risk-free for 100 days and turn your mealtime into me time. Get the Tovala Smart Oven now for just $69 (originally $299) today.

Learn more

This is not to say my life is charmed. Many, many, many things have not worked out, both in my career and in my day-to-day life. I fail, I pick the wrong job, I get hurt, I hurt other people, I get sick. I stew over errors and curse my overconfidence. If I am lucky, the universe has a weird way of demonstrating it.

Except that overall things are pretty good, and when I try to trace their origins, I keep coming back to luck: a coincidence a decade past, a chance encounter on the subway, a spontaneous turn down an alleyway. Whoever I am, whatever I’ve accomplished floats in an ocean of randomness; the choices I’ve made were but directional nudges in an unpredictable current. How did I get here? And how easily could I be somewhere else, someone else, if the wind had gusted from the southeast instead of the northeast?

Luck explains it all, and there is no explanation. Things happened the way they did because they happened the way they did, the result of an infinity of factors, and my contributions, whether thoughtful or instinctual, were minimal at best. For me, luck is the only explanation.

Let’s be clear, though: I may be lucky, but I don’t want to say, or think, that I am lucky. Luck operates with the mystery of an Almighty—you cannot rely on it the way you’d like to. Luck is inhuman and fickle. Luck is a Sasquatch glimpsed at twilight in the rearview mirror. I once read research about Chinese gamblers’ conception of luck: The idea was that luck itself was innate to a person, and you gambled to prove you were lucky. You might lose, you might lose often, but you could, through superstitious behavior (red undies, the number 8), alter the external world of luck and maybe finally for once win—and prove yourself lucky on the inside. That’s not me. I don’t need to prove it. I need only accept that I am lucky to have been lucky… so far.

The thing is, I am still uncomfortable saying that I affirmatively believe in anything, even in a concept as flighty and ephemeral as luck. It’s more than I can’t believe in luck’s opposite, a deterministic universe, in which consequence follows from clear consequence to produce the reality I now inhabit, not to mention the future I’m about to enter. Given all I’ve seen and done, the close shaves and the bullseyes alike, that idea seems ridiculously far-fetched. Not only is there no fate but what we make—there is no fate. And so, in the absence of belief in clear order and logic, luck fills the void. To some, I know, this may be terrifying, but I find it comforting to submit to the inscrutable whims of the universe. There’s only so much I can ever do, so why worry about what I can’t?

Lingering behind that serenity, however, is a fear—that someday the luck that has carried me so far will abandon me once and for all. The failures will mount, the options will dwindle, the chances of escape into a new, fresh future will shrink to zero. And then what will I have², my own weak hands and too many words flowing from an overfull brain? What good are they?

Because I’ve had some, uh, issues with Christianity, I also worry that in this state the proselytizers will find me and take advantage of my damaged soul. They’ll convince me to replace my luck with their God, and you’ll see me born again, proclaiming an alien faith with all my meager powers. I’d make a good preacher, wouldn’t I? Okay, enough fantasy: This ain’t happening. Whatever made me—whether a supreme being or a supreme accident—I am who I am, an unbeliever. I was born this way, and if one day the only option left to me is faith, I’ll wait for something more. 🪨🪨🪨

Notes

1. Cf. Myanmar.

2. I imagine this is what believers who sin go through, the worry that their god has given up on them, left them in a world without his magic, where he doesn’t care enough even to dangle loathsome insects like them over a flame.

Read Yesterday’s Attempt