There are two kinds of people: those who believe that they鈥檙e in control of their lives, and those who believe 鈥� who know 鈥� that the universe deals in random chance.
A recent B.C. court ruling in a simple personal injury case, illustrates the point.
This case involved a young woman who was driving in Victoria a few years ago. She stopped at a red light.
Bam!
Another driver rear-ended her. She was shaken up, but her car was drivable. She drove off.
Bam!
She was hit again, four minutes later, rear-ended at a different red light, by a different driver, just blocks from the first crash!
What are the odds of that?
They鈥檙e long odds, sure. But there are literally millions of people driving every day across Canada. A certain number of them are going to get hit by other drivers. Eventually, the law of large numbers means that weird things, like getting hit twice in the exact same way, just minutes apart, is going to happen to someone.
And none of us can guarantee that the person being hit by those long odds isn鈥檛 going to be us.
That鈥檚 the thing about chance. Just when you think you鈥檝e got everything planned out, and you鈥檙e in charge of your own destiny, it鈥檒l take you down a peg.
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Very few people get that one burger contaminated with E. coli, or let it ride on red and win five times in a row in Vegas, or are struck by lightning, or step into an elevator with their favourite celebrity, or have a chunk of frozen septic waste that fell off a passing 747 plunge through the roof of their house.
But all those things will happen to someone.
Luck 鈥� only good or bad depending on how we perceive it 鈥� happens.
This is something we do our best to ignore, because it鈥檚 terrifying.
When our luck is good, we try as much as possible to make sure we pretend that we made that luck happen. We played our lucky numbers in the lotto, we prepared hard for that job interview, we 鈥渕anifested鈥� those coveted concert tickets.
And when luck is bad 鈥� well, maybe it was someone else鈥檚 fault? The government, probably, yeah, I bet they鈥檙e behind it somehow!
Admitting that the universe is mostly random is impossible to face head on all the time, because it makes us feel small and powerless.
Just writing this column is making me feel anxious about driving home. Do you know how many horrific car crashes I鈥檝e covered? I have a very clear idea of what an out-of-control dump truck can do to the passenger compartment of a mid-sized car.
Pretending that random chance doesn鈥檛 exist is the only way to get through the day without having a nervous breakdown.
We forget about chance as a self-defence mechanism.
But it鈥檚 still there, randomly playing with our lives, for good or ill. None of us is ever really in control.
