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Can we make our own luck?
“You’re always so lucky!”
This was the exclamation from my son while we were playing an online game together last weekend. In this game, you clicked on the character to get a random superpower and I kept getting the epic ones, whereas he kept getting common. [Sidenote: this is clearly a first world problem.]
My son’s comment, tinged with a mix of envy and frustration, got me thinking about the concept of luck. What is luck, really? Luck is a word we hear used in a lot of everyday conversations. Often times when used it is done so with a view that luck is something that happens to some people but not others. Our world is filled with the lucky people, and the unlucky people. Luck is often seen to be outside of our control and something that happens to us regardless of our actions.
When my son exclaims how lucky he thinks I am because a random computer-generated outcome is always positive for me (and less so for him), he’s really attributing a perception of luck based on this chance outcome. His perception is that I am always getting a positive outcome, hence I’m so lucky. In reality, if we kept a record of what superpowers each of us received, we’d undoubtedly find they conformed to the level of chance programmed into the game.
It also ignores any actions that both of us took based on the initial outcomes of chance. So, when…
