Life, Luck, Prayer, Contentment
Some would say my obsession with musings about varied aspects of life, including the formative, productive, and terminational years is just too morbid, unhealthy, or at minimal, too excessive. “What is the point?” may well be the question many ask themselves. I have asked myself the same question many times in my life time, and this musing tries to answer the question.
Diversity is a requisite factor in God’s Evolutionary process. Without diversity there is no progress.That the process is slow is obvious considering such a long evolutionary history. The human species always behaves too much as if we are really running the show, determining the future, are God’s favorite species, can achieve some sort of Heaven after death, can have a personal interaction of some sort with God, that God is judging us, that no matter our sins, we can at any point be forgiven and be salvaged for some sort of Heaven. Be this as it may, none of this is evident throughout the history of our own species. If God was in anyway protecting certain human groups this would be evident enough. That is, for the Group God is protecting, that group would have clearly a better record regarding any of the things for which humans pray. No such stats exist. Clearly God’s laws which govern the evolutionary process apply to all humans with no evidence that God interferes with His own laws to protect any individuals.
It is hard for me to remember when I first stopped praying to God. I do know I felt more and more uncomfortable pretending God was going to aid me and leave so many others, with so much more severe difficulties than I, in the lurch. We all see heart wrenching situations in which so many good, helpless humans have the most horrible things happen to them. Unless one wants to consider God a sadist, He is not personally singling anyone out for such bad luck. Just our genetic and environmental variations are grossly unfair. While the evolutionary process is obviously amazing, progressive, and everlasting, a lot of individual members of all species pay a heavy price. Humans are the only species advanced enough to collectively help the less fortunate to attain more contentment in their lives. That is essentially the ethical nature of our species. It has nothing to do with inherited religions, form of government, culture, and so on. The irony is that while we pray to God to help ourselves or others, it is all of us, collectively, which have to provide this help. It’s the Golden Rule. Everyone everywhere understands that this Rule is an ethical truism. Which is not to say such understanding generates much ethical behavior by everyone.
Given that we all seek to maximize contentment in our lives, this musing will look at the impact of Luck in our lives. All of us could make a list of all the good and bad luck we have encountered in our lives. Then again, what would be the point? Luck is what it is by definition. We can’t change that. If we win the lottery, we win the lottery. We can’t influence whether we win or not unless we simply refuse to play the lottery. If we no play, we no can win. Life is similar except we don’t get to decide whether we play. Happenstance does that. If we suffer too much bad luck I suppose we can end our lives, but that is about the only way to escape. Some really good people, by most anyone’s measure, die young. They didn’t deserve to die young, and it does nothing to simply pass it all off as ‘God operates in mysterious ways.’ It would be like saying that the person who invented Poker is responsible for those who lose.
Since we all strive to maximize contentment in our lives, it probably starts by accepting a lot of the realities of life, including the need for us to be ethical as a means to achieve more contentment. Those who help others and those who receive help achieve more contentment in their lives. Those who get too wrapped up in themselves or ‘family values’ never achieve much contentment in their lives. All of us know people with few material possessions who are far more contented in life than a Donald Trump or an Ayatollah, or a Kanye West, etc.—who are perpetually angry about most everyone and everything in life.
Until we accept the realities of life, it is hard to maximize contentment. We are going to die, we are going to have bad luck, we are not always going to have a level playing field, we didn’t get to choose our parents, our place of birth, the schools we went to, our youthful peers, and the list goes on an on. We are what we are, others are what they are, and collectively we can, in theory make the lives of all more contented. Praying to God is not the answer, our collective action is the only avenue for achieving the maximum contentment for the greatest number of people. Some can share excess wealth, all can contribute time in their lives to help others, and some can take difficult stands at work or via politics to help meet the needs of the less fortunate. How we employ the Golden Rule will vary just like so much else in real life varies.
A friend once said to me: “You always seem to have good luck and survive difficult situations.” I have pondered this like I ponder a lot of aspects of life. It seems to have been true. No one was more frail (an exaggeration of course) than I as a child. I got just about every childhood disease imaginable except polio. The antibiotics to treat most of these diseases had become available less than ten years before my birth. And the one prevalent disease, for which there was no medicine to cure, was polio, and I didn’t get that disease. Clearly, this is luck, pure and simple. I was able to attend a prestigious college only because of a track scholarship— that I ever ran track at all was never my idea but the consequence of a young track coach who virtually stalked me until I did go out for track and cross-country. The scholarship was pure good luck. I was not the best biology student by far and yet got chosen by my undergraduate department Chair to be the Senior Biology Course Assistant. I got fired after two years teaching and coaching at a rural high school after clashing with the Principal but that only resulted in the Chairperson of the Physiology Department at the Univ. of Wisconsin Medical School allowing me to achieve a Ph.D. in Physiology while teaching Student Nurses in another state. That was pure luck. On my first University teaching job I was promoted and tenured early by the Chairperson of my department because in her words “You are good for our students, but you need to be tenured right now before you make too many enemies.” What is that but sheer luck? Such good luck continued right up until I retired. But enough of me as an example of good luck.
Naturally I pondered why so many persons, many of whom I was not really close to at all, kept pulling my career out of the ‘fire’. I concluded this: we can make waves and survive if the waves are never about our own personal acquisition of titles, power, or money. When we fight battles for those who are powerless to help themselves, there will often be someone in a position to save our ass because they see it as an injustice to nail someone just because they make a lot of enemies defending those less fortunate. This is not to say I never had any bad luck. In fact the worst of bad luck impacted negatively on my personal life in a rather permanent way. This is what it is: good luck and bad luck operate independently by definition.
Enough good luck enables us to enter our terminational years with gratefulness as the main emotion. If we cannot be grateful for our formative and productive years, then the terminational years become a challenge. Too many people who should be grateful are not, for varied reasons, and this limits the amount of contentment they attain in their terminational years. Everything is relative, and if we can’t view life through that prism, then we become hampered by an attitude of “enough is never enough”. A high percentage of persons who become quite wealthy can never shake that “enough is never enough’ trap and their level of daily contentment is simply sad.
What about those who say “we create our own good luck and bad luck”. The trouble with that is, if we create it, then it is not luck at all. Nothing seems more disingenuous to me than most of those who proclaim “I achieved my successes the old fashioned way, I earned them.” For the most part it is gross exaggeration as it would certainly be for me to feel that way.
Bad luck exists, of course, but what should we do about our past bad luck in our terminational years? Fostering regret during our terminational years is simply useless and ignorant. Once we understand and accept how the laws which govern the evolutionary process work, it is foolishness to keep swimming upstream against the injustices inherent in the process. If we suffer some bad hands in a poker game, we don’t blame the person who invented the game for the bad hands. We don’t blame the other participants in the game either unless they cheated. And we continue to play the game if that is our inclination because we enjoy the times we win. Life is of the same ilk.
Here is the ultimate reality: Our level of contentment depends on the amount of good luck we get in life and the good luck others get via us. If we simply take and not give, our contentment will be limited. It is not possible, given the nature of the evolutionary process, for everyone to achieve the same level of contentment. There is no singular way for such diverse people to achieve the same level of contentment. But, proper behavior collectively can maximize the degree of contentment for everyone. For all the affluence and ‘good life’ many of us now live, we are well aware that millions of people on this planet today are suffering from outrageous personal situations. With endless media access we have become numbed by the injustices heaped on so many fellow human beings. My own level of personal contentment exists alongside a heavy sadness for the environmental predicament faced by millions of my own species. It is enough to make empathetic people be teary eyed for them. In another instance of luck, I don’t have any expensive hobbies at all, so it is little effort on my part to spend more each year on the less fortunate than I do on myself. It isn’t even close. It is an obligation that I feel strongly about. When I retired, my time spent helping the less fortunate one on one had to end. It is too emotionally taxing. There are several ways to help the less fortunate, and at this stage in life it is through my FANAFI Fund.
Human behavior is evolving too. The bind here is human activities are hurting so many species that we are now in one of the 6 greatest extinction periods in Evolutionary History. At the same time humans have overpopulated our planet. With natural resources limited we are now in a phase where more and more people seek a good size piece of the pie. We are getting on each other’s nerves 24 hrs a day big time. While ‘Rome burns” we are mostly busy amusing ourselves. The distribution of global wealth is creating massive shifts to a very rich few. In the U.S. 2-5% of the population owns 90% of our national wealth. Capitalism is great, but only if it has fair regulations and limits. When the wealthy set the regulations and limits, there ends up being no limits and endless loop holes in tax codes so that it becomes easier and easier for the already wealthy to accumulate even more wealth at an exponential rate.
Relevant Attestations:
Be prepared, work hard, and hope for a little luck. Recognize that the harder you work and the better prepared you are, the more luck you might have. Ed Bradley
Be grateful for luck. Pay the thunder no mind - listen to the birds. And don't hate nobody. Eubie Blake
Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination. Christopher Isherwood
Your competition is not other people but the time you kill, the ill will you create, the knowledge you neglect to learn, the connections you fail to build, the health you sacrifice along the path, your inability to generate ideas, the people around you who don't support and love your efforts, and whatever God you curse for your bad luck. James Altucher
It's hard to detect good luck - it looks so much like something you've earned. Frank A. Clark
My success was due to good luck, hard work, and support and advice from friends and mentors. But most importantly, it depended on me to keep trying after I had failed. Mark Warner (I like this one)
The latitude and longitudinal lines of where you are born determine your opportunity in life, and it's not equal. We may have been created equal, but we're not born equal. It's a lot to do with luck and you have to pass that on. Brad Pitt
I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm. Franklin D. Roosevelt
Ambition drives you on, ability certainly helps, but the fickle finger of fate and luck are great things. Fergus Henderson
