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Luck is all in your mind
The ancient Stoics wrote quite a bit about luck, or Fortuna (from the name of the goddess that personified it), particularly Seneca. To begin with, we should not trust luck:
“No man has ever been so far advanced by Fortune that she did not threaten him as greatly as she had previously indulged him. Do not trust her seeming calm; in a moment the sea is moved to its depths. The very day the ships have made a brave show in the games, they are engulfed.” (Letters IV.7)
You may feel lucky because things have been going well for you for some time, but that’s the thing about luck: she can turn on you in a moment. So what’s the Stoic attitude toward Fortuna? To make ourselves immune from her, by caring only about the things she does not control (and we do):
“Fortune has no jurisdiction over character.” (Letters XXXVI.6)
Meaning that to work on becoming better persons is up to us, and is done through the continuous practice of the four cardinal virtues of practical wisdom, courage, justice and temperance. Even the most unlucky person in the world can still do that, and the most lucky ones ought to do it, in part so that they may use their luck wisely.
But what does modern science have to say about luck? A recent article by Steven Hales in Aeon magazine, entitled “The unreality of luck,” sheds some interesting light. Hales begins with the astonishing tale of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a technician for oil tankers, who was sent to another city by Mitsubishi, the company he worked for, to do some work during the summer of 1945. That city was Hiroshima, and Yamaguchi was there when the atomic bomb dropped. Miraculously, he survived with minor injuries and was sent back home. To Nagasaki, where the second bomb was dropped shortly thereafter. He survived that too, and died at the ripe age of 93, in 2010.
Hales asks us to consider what may appear the sort of quintessentially odd question that philosophers are the only ones to take seriously: was Yamaguchi lucky or unlucky? If you reflect for a moment, you will see that there really is no fact…
