Do you feel lucky? How luck shapes how we think the world works 🤞
When was the last time you felt lucky, or unlucky? Chances are it’s an idea that drifts in and out of your head with some regularity. But have you ever wondered where it comes from and why it forms part of our beliefs about how the world works?
People can be lucky for catching a bus on time, or unlucky for choosing the wrong partner. We can feel fortunate to be born where we are, but unfortunate for not being born in the right place at the right time. We can be unlucky for being born in the wrong body, or lucky that we have met the people we have.
But what’s it for? Why do we evaluate our experiences through a lens of fortune? Well, I went looking.
Luck be thy name 🍀
Luck has been with us for a very long time. The etymology of the word itself goes back to the 1480s, when it appears as a gambling term to mean good fortune. But the idea itself goes back even further. Aristotle tried to make sense of luck back in ancient Greece.
The Romans even created Fortuna, the goddess of luck, and developed rituals and games that they believed were a way of communicating directly with the deity.
In mediaeval Europe, superstitions and folklore were borne out of a need to harness it and ward off bad luck. Black cats, broken mirrors, four-leaf clovers, and the number 13 all came out of this era.
Despite the age of Enlightenment and a shift to science and reason, luck persisted. It’s still in our lives today. During the 2016 election campaign, President Obama attempted to recruit luck by playing basketball before each primary election; Michael Jordan wore his college practice shorts underneath his NBA uniform for good luck. And there’s a steady flow of articles using luck as a way of explaining why things happen.
Matt Hussey
But what is it?
Well, at its simplest, it’s a way of interpreting something that happens. When something bad happens, it can be because we were unlucky. When something good happens, we interpret it as having good luck. It is a word that appears when we experience something beyond our control.
The more uncertain life becomes, the more likely we are to believe in luck. Gamblers are often the biggest believers in luck and create elaborate routines to help improve their chances of winning. Professional athletes too are big luck believers. Have a look at Rafael Nadal’s pre-game ritual. Fun fact: When asked in interviews if he’s superstitious, he says no. But not everyone is quite so willing to accept luck’s hold over us.
Luck is what Chip Denman, one of the world’s biggest critics of supernatural beliefs calls, “probability taken personally.” In essence, it’s a nonsensical answer to life’s random events. It takes the idea of chance and hands it over to lucky charms, superstitions, spirits, sprites, you name it. We can’t explain why something happens, but we spend all our time trying to avoid the idea that shit does really just happen. Some people have it, some people don’t.
Matt Hussey
Frano Selak, a music teacher from Croatia, has been referred to as the luckiest person on earth after he (allegedly) survived seven brushes with death including a train wreck, plane crash, car catching fire, and bus plunging into a river.
Then there’s Costis Mitsotakis, who some say is the world’s unluckiest man. He was the only resident in a small Spanish village not to win a share of a whopping $922 million jackpot in 2011. He even made a film about it.
For many of us, this seems plausible. It’s easier to accept that luck plays a mysterious role in our lives, than it is to say life is random, chaotic, and unpredictable, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But might there be something more behind it? Some certainly think so.
Luck be a lady 🔮
In 1997, two Canadian psychologists created a scale to assess how lucky we perceived ourselves to be. Called the Belief in Good Luck Scale (BIGL), it set out to understand how belief in luck affected those who believed strongly in its powers, versus those who didn’t.
What they found was that high believers in luck tended to have a more optimistic outlook on life. That in turn, meant they were more likely to take chances: they had a more positive view on what might happen next. While not every decision was necessarily beneficial, harnessing luck did seem to make strong believers take more chances. In essence, they were creating their own luck by creating more opportunities for them to attribute their lives to good luck.
Luck, says psychologists, serves a function: both positive and negative. It can help us cope with chance events, such as being involved in an accident, a mugging, or a natural disaster, and it can help people feel more optimistic when circumstances are beyond their control. It can also do the opposite.
It can trap people in the idea that nothing is in their control and can rob them of the belief that they are the captain of their own ship. Bad luck can be used to explain poor decision-making and to avoid taking responsibility for our actions. The both seem to come as a pair. To believe in one means we believe in the other.
Matt Hussey
Indeed, people trapped in wars and conflict embrace fortune. Psychologist Giora Keinan surveyed people caught up in the first Gulf War in the early 1990s. She asked them about their superstitious beliefs - with a specific focus on luck - and found those who lived closer to the Iraqi border, engaged far more in rituals - and the role fortune played - than those who lived further away.
But she also found people who practiced these beliefs tended to experience lower levels of anxiety than those who did not. It helped provide a sense of control or influence over things that seemed beyond their conscious control. If they got through the day unharmed? Luck probably played a role. The same can be said of athletes.
In a University of Connecticut study, they found when basketball players kissed the ball before a throw, spun the ball or played out any form of repetitive ritual, they seemed to score more consistently than those who didn’t. When they believed they could influence luck, they did better.
This is what psychologists call the compensatory control model: we compensate for a lack of control in one domain by seeking it in another. Whether or not it is real control is irrelevant. It works. In experiments conducted by psychologist Alison Brooks, she found rituals designed to speak to luck and fortune improved people’s maths scores, how they sang, and even how athletes performed. Why? Because it makes us feel like we have some control over uncertain things. It can help us feel like we know what’s happening and why, which forms part of a bigger idea about life itself.
Lucky Streak 📈
There are almost an infinite number of moments of good luck that led you to read this newsletter. From clicking on the headline or picking up your phone going all the way back to the moment you were born. I like to think it’s because you’re brilliant and wonderful and amazing, but looking at the numbers, getting here to this point required billions of moments where things went right over the things that went wrong.
In fact, our entire existence is built on this very idea. Our planet orbiting this sun at the right distance, is pretty fortunate, given how little evidence we see of it anywhere else. From the right combination of elements in our atmosphere to the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs allowing mammals to emerge, to the perils of humanity’s existence across millennia, to your parents meeting each other and having you.
These are all moments where the odds are stacked against all of us for making it this far. But made it we have. This all could be just down to chance and probability. But humans don’t cope with the abstract concept that things just happen for no reason and have no meaning.
Matt Hussey
I think luck is part of a wider idea psychologists call meaning-making: the process by which we understand and make sense of life events, relationships, and the self. We are meaning-making machines: constantly looking for reasons - fair and foul - for why things happen to us.
Luck forms part of that idea: an at once visible and invisible force that can be shaped and guided sometimes to help us understand the why of something. It might not stand up to any logical scrutiny, but then again, our existence doesn’t either. Is it lucky that we exist on a rock that flies through space at 67,000 miles an hour while spinning at 1,000 miles an hour that also happens to be the right distance from the sun, with the right atmosphere, and the right elements to support life? Probably. If our heads choose to believe in luck to help us make sense of things, is it that bad?
Someone who knew more about that idea than anyone else was psychiatrist and philosopher Viktor Frankl. During World War II, he and his wider family were deported to Nazi concentration camps. His father died of starvation and pneumonia. In 1944, Frankl and his surviving relatives were transported to Auschwitz, where his mother and brother were murdered in the gas chambers. His wife Tilly died later of typhus in Bergen-Belsen. He saw the worst of humanity, up close.
Matt Hussey
To make sense of this unbelievably horrific experience, he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, documenting how he and his fellow prisoners made sense of what was happening to them. He found that those able to find meaning in the camps, and afterwards, were the most likely to survive and come back to life. Were they unlucky to be born Jewish in the early twentieth century, or were they lucky to have survived the camps? That, in a very real sense, said Frankl, became a matter of life and death.
Luck is part of a toolkit humans have created to allow us to cope with the random, the unexplained, and the unpredictable. It’s a thin veil of protection against the harsh winds of chance and probability. Sometimes it serves us, sometimes it conspires against us. But most of all I think, it keeps us company.
Things we learned this week 🤓
- 🧠 Smarter men are less aggressive and more committed in relationships, says study.
- 💔 We are more likely to find someone attractive, if we see someone else find them attractive first.
- 😭 Loneliness increases odds of dementia by 35%.
- 👫 Women with divorced friends more likely to divorce themselves.
Just a list of proper mental health services I always recommend 💡
Here is a list of excellent mental health services that are vetted and regulated that I share with the therapists I teach:
- 👨👨👦👦 Peer Support Groups - good relationships are one of the quickest ways to improve wellbeing. Rethink Mental Illness has a database of peer support groups across the UK.
- 📝 Samaritans Directory - the Samaritans, so often overlooked for the work they do, has a directory of organisations that specialise in different forms of distress. From abuse to sexual identity, this is a great place to start if you’re looking for specific forms of help.
- 💓 Hubofhope - A brilliant resource. Simply put in your postcode and it lists all the mental health services in your local area.
I love you all. 💋