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Monday, August 10, 2009

What are the odds?

Lottery fever has been sweeping through this country of late, all due to tonight's draw - someone, somewhere, will win 27 million euros. Which, we'll all agree, is a shitload of money.

Chances are that the majority of the people you know –friends, family, your local grocer, you name it- have never, and will never, win a substantial amount of money in a lottery. On the surface, this may seem like bad luck, but really, it’s because that’s the way lotteries work. But when you think about it, really think about, every single one of us is a winner in the greatest lottery imaginable: life.

No, I am not a jehovah’s witness. Please carry on reading.

Consider: your parents, two wholly separate people leading wholly separate lives. The odds that these two people, leading their lives in a world filled to the brim with other people, happen to encounter each other under circumstances that allow for love and companionship to develop is, at best, infinitesimal. Both of them, throughout their lives, both separate and together, have encountered people, situations unforeseen, forks in the road, have made decisions small and big too many to count, every one of which could have profoundly altered the reality you find yourself in right now, as you are reading this.

But they didn't. Every part in their lives, every variable, no matter how small, has lead up to this point, to you, your appearance, your character, your intellect, your guilty pleasures, your way of life.

And this is not just the case with your parents. This reverberates all the way back to your furthest ancestors. You are the apex of millennia worth of genealogy, the culmination of a chain of coincidences, chance encounters, lucky breaks and split-second decisions so unfathomably large and profound that it is impossible to comprehend. You, just by living, have defied the odds of history.

So screw the lottery. You’ve already won.

2 Comments:

Blogger Pep said...

Ooh, profound.
You feeling OK? You got a bit last night, didn't you? :D

11:13 am  
Blogger Martin said...

I have my moments.

11:28 am  

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