They say that fortune favors the bold.
I guess I haven't been brave enough.
Or, fortunate enough.
Fortune is about luck. About rolling the dice and surviving. Essentially, those exemplars who have "made a fortune" by being bold, are not examples of wealth makers, they are examples of survivorship bias. They were bold, they did win, but they got lucky. The saying excludes all the other bold people who weren't so fortunate and lost.
I'm a loser baby.
So why don't you kill me.
What if the "good life" that we look to have, where our overall experiences are trending positively, is just luck based? Some people are lucky and have a good life, some people are not. Some people fall on their feet even when they screw up, some people fall on their face, even when they do what is right.
It is easy perhaps to look at it from the perspective of privilege, where some are born into circumstances that give them a head start, a leg up, less friction to success. Compare that to underprivileged who have less to begin with, less opportunity to build, and more hurdles in the way to success. However, what if, with all things remaining equal otherwise, one person can just be innately more lucky than another? How does that make you feel?
I was talking about this with my wife this evening, where I believe that she might have an easier time of it, if she wasn't with me, as I am an innately unlucky person. It is not that it is all bad luck, but there is more negative events than positive, and those negative events tend to target the parts of my life that are positive. It is a bit like a one of those cliché lines in a movie, where the character says, "Everyone who gets close to me, ends up dead" except, it is any time I find something I enjoy, or like, it gets taken away.
Perhaps if she was with someone else, she would attract more positive experiences for herself. Maybe, she has a lucky trait, but she got stuck with me whilst I was in a lucky peak, and soon after, it returned to the baseline.
Poor girl.
This might sound like crazy talk, but nature doesn't care about success and failure, it doesn't care about anything at all. We can't "destroy nature" like environmentalists purport. All we can do, is change conditions in ways that will eventually make it unable to support human life. We will disappear, but nature won't. It is unkillable.
And it always balances. Energy moves around the system, but the system doesn't gain or lose energy, it is always at 1. A perfect economy. However, there are natural laws that nature follows that direct evolution, like the path of least resistance. Essentially, nature follows a rule of the easiest way. Depending on the conditions, the easiest way will create many variations, from slight to quite extreme, through natural selection, and potentially random deformity.
Maybe, lucky and lucky are two such variants.
Looking at it from an A/B test perspective, maybe nature's hypothesis for which would survive the conditions is that a lucky person might win because they have a head start, but could lose because they become more complacent and soft. The hypothesis for the unlucky trait might be that an unlucky person may win because they strive to break their pattern to succeed, or lose because they were unable to overcome their conditions. Nature doesn't care which wins, or which loses, or if either survive.
Nature doesn't need us.
At least from human experience terms, we seem to believe that being unlucky is not a winning strategy, so we attempt to change our luck and break the chain. And, even if we are unable to break our own streak, we try to improve the privilege of our kids, to help them have a better head start. This might be vital for them to succeed, because they might have the bad luck gene passed to them from the parents, so they will need all the help they can get.
I am not Bold. I am not brave. But I keep surviving the tests. However, survival isn't a good life, it is just not dying. There is no satisfaction in not dying, unless there is something worth living for. But, if what is worth living for is continually taken away, what happens when there is nothing left?
Why survive?
There might be a fortune to be made, but what does it matter.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]