I

 

“Monks, suppose this great earth were totally covered with water, and a man were to toss a yoke with a single hole there. A wind from the east would push it west; a wind from the west would push it east. A wind from the north would push it south; a wind from the south would push it north. And suppose a blind sea turtle were there. It would come to the surface once every one hundred years. Now what do you think? Would that blind sea turtle, coming to the surface once every one hundred years, stick his neck into the yoke with a single hole?”

“It would be a sheer coincidence, Blessed One, that the blind sea turtle, coming to the surface once every one hundred years, would stick his neck into the yoke with a single hole.”

“It’s likewise a sheer coincidence that one obtains the human state.”

— Chiggala Sutta (“The Hole”), Samyutta Nikaya 56.48, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu

 

Do you know what your odds are?

The odds of you, I mean.

The odds of you being born specifically as you.

Reformulated: What’s the probability of the biological you — not some other “you” — existing?

Statistically, it’s an almost meaningless question. To venture a guess, you’d need to establish the odds of life on Earth in the first place. And starting there omits from the calculation the astronomical (figuratively and literally) odds of our star and our planet being situated just so, and ignores a lot of physical (and metaphysical) questions about the universe in general.

Scientists still haven’t cracked the abiogenesis mystery. There’s no comprehensive, let alone agreed upon, account of how life emerged from non-living matter on Earth. Such an account (a verified description of so-called “spontaneous generation”) is a prerequisite for determining your personal existence odds. The chances of abiogenesis are the starting point for calculating the chances of the biological you in the (again, cosmically narrow) context of our planet.

If we start instead with the first appearance of the Homo genus, the odds of any particular living person (the chances of you, the biological individual) are theoretically quantifiable. In practical terms, that just means we can venture a guess.

One such guess comes from Ali Binazir, author, McKinsey veteran, Harvard BA, UC San Diego MD, Cambridge philosophy MA, clinical hypnotherapist and self-declared “happiness engineer.” Binazir, who should win an award for eclectic resumes, is also a hyperpolyglot. He speaks seven languages.

In 2011, Binazir published an entertaining calculation, and later an essay, the purpose of which is to demonstrate how statistically miraculous you (me, anybody) really are. The math starts three million years ago with humanoids, assumes a generation equals 20 years and that the overall (i.e., across the entire history of humanity) odds of “any one human offspring” living long enough to reproduce is 50:50.

“What,” he asks, would be the chances, under those assumptions, that “your particular lineage remained unbroken” for the implied 150,000 generations? The answer’s 1 in 10^45,000, a number Binazir helpfully notes is “not just larger than all of the particles in the universe” but in fact “larger than all the particles in the universe if each particle were itself a universe.”

But those are just the odds that all of your ancestors successfully reproduced. That figure doesn’t account for the impossibly long gamete odds over that entire 150,000-generation lineage. As Binazir puts it, you need “the exact right ancestor” all the way on down, through time, to end up creating you specifically, as opposed to someone “similar to you but not quite you.”

Ultimately, Binazir’s calculations suggest your odds — the odds of your existing — are 1 in 10^2,685,000. That’s an unintelligible number. Thankfully, Binazir offers some context. Imagine everyone in the city of Houston gets together, each rolls a trillion-sided dice and they all roll the exact same number. That’s the probability of you (or me or anyone).

So, we’re a statistical impossibility without even accounting for the long odds of everything that happened more than three million years ago. “I’ve just shown that you are a miracle,” Binazir declares.

Incidentally, Binazir ran the odds on Buddha’s turtle too. That probability — of the once-a-century surfacing resulting in the turtle’s head poking through the single life preserver tossed randomly into the ocean — is 1 in 700 trillion. Give or take.

II

 

“[I]magine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”

— Douglas Adams

 

Binazir’s exercise — and especially his miracle framing — may elicit a few smirks, groans and eye rolls. It also risks sending the philosophically-minded down rabbit holes and into conniption fits.

The odds of you (or me or Binazir) on the narrowest biological definition are infinitesimal, but the odds of some “you” (or some me, or some Binazir) interested in these “probabilities” are apparently quite high because… well, because here we are discussing the calculation.

If we didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be able to marvel at how purportedly incredible our existence is. So, is it really incredible? And, more to the point, is it even relevant? Is Binazir posing the right question?

1 in 10^2,685,000 is a philosophically-misleading number. The outside-looking-in “odds” (with scare quotes) of a lot of things can be made to look infinitesimal. That doesn’t mean everything’s a miracle. Or if it does, we certainly don’t recognize as much.

The problem here’s selection bias. Binazir treats this as though we’re sampling from all possible people who could’ve existed, but really we’re asking about people who do exist and who are asking after this particular probability. Binazir assumes an outside-looking-in perspective, but we can’t experience that, only model it. The only perspective we can experience is the inside perspective (your perspective). Conditioned on that, it’s hardly surprising that you exist.

You can take that too far, though. While it’s self-evidently true that we can only observe a universe that allows for observers — that’s a tautology and as such, it’s irrefutable — that observation can be misused and exploited in the service of drawing teleological or, even “worse,” theological, conclusions.

For example, some ostensibly rigorous proofs of intelligent design center around the notion that our existence is proof that we’re necessary. But that reverses cause and effect. Obviously, life didn’t cause the universe to exist as it currently does. That’s a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. To commit it willfully is a crime against logic. To commit it unwittingly is to stumble into Adams’s puddle.

There’s no “clean” way to place Binazir’s exercise in this age-old philosophical dispute. His educational background means he’s doubtlessly aware of the philosophical debate, and the backbone of his math is biology which, on some strict interpretations, is mutually exclusive with the teleological and particularly with the theological.

Further, he’s a happiness coach, so the miracle framing’s meant to be motivational not devotional. Still, “miracle” carries a different connotation than, say, “wonder” or “marvel.” It has divine overtones and that’ll make any atheist just as uncomfortable as they’d be in the presence of someone leveraging the selection bias problem to make a teleological argument about the nature of our existence.

When faced with Binazir’s math exercise, an atheist might wonder which is worse: Selection bias that results in astronomical odds which are used to frame human existence as a “miracle,” or reasoning which, in the course of dissolving the miracle, goes too far and ends up positing a fine-tuned, purpose-built universe.

Either track’s vulnerable to exploitation in the service of manufacturing a false notion of human exceptionalism, one via implausibility the other via necessity.

III

 

“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.”

— Rust Cohle

 

There’s no actual data to back up the oft-cited claim that nearly three-quarters of lottery winners lose most (or all) of their money within half a decade.

That phantom statistic’s typically attributed to the National Endowment for Financial Education. In 2018, the NEFE explicitly disavowed the figures, blaming their ubiquity on unscrupulous journalism. “Frequent reporting — without validation from NEFE — has allowed this ‘stat’ to survive online in perpetuity,” the organization said.

A similar statistic suggesting nearly a third of lottery winners eventually declare bankruptcy is likewise dubious, at least when it’s attributed to the CFP Board of Standards. A 2018 CNBC article citing the figure was corrected seven years later with a footnote that reads, “A statistic about lottery winner bankruptcy rates attributed to the CFP Board could not be verified and has been removed.”

Although a handful of fairly rigorous studies using narrow subsets (a 2009 sample of lucky Floridians, for example) provides some insight into relative bankruptcy rates for winners, no one’s established a generally-accepted, overall “go-broke” rate for lottery winners.

Simply put, the so-called “lottery curse” is an old wives’ tale that owes its ubiquity to bad journalism and selection bias: You hear about the winner who blew $20 million on drugs and sports cars, but never about the winner who invested $5 million, retired and lived quietly ever after.

But there’s more to it than that. Like a lot of old wives’ tales, the lottery curse myth resonates because it’s intuitive. Money often creates as many problems as it solves and it’s famously useless when it comes to purchasing the only thing that ultimately matters. The realization that happiness can’t be bought is, for some, an existential crisis.

So while the lottery curse as defined by, for example, the relative frequency of bankruptcies among winners, may be a myth, there’s something to it at a deeper level. A financial windfall on near-impossible odds certainly meets one definition of “gift,” but for some, that windfall becomes an albatross — a curse.

Winning the human life lottery — hitting the 1 in 700 trillion jackpot in the Buddha’s turtle parable — can also be described as an impossibly lucky break, the unfathomable odds of which demand it be cherished, not squandered.

But the very thing that makes us unique — hyper-consciousness and deep self-awareness — can make the human form a burden. The tension isn’t in the apparent contradiction between, on one hand, human life as an inconceivably rare, and therefore invaluable, opportunity and, on the other, the different forms of suffering we experience as humans. The whole point is that in being human, we have the wherewithal to discern the true nature of suffering and in doing so, overcome it.

The friction, rather, is in the juxtaposition between existing in a state that affords an opportunity to achieve enlightenment, and the imperative of eschewing an attachment to that opportunity. For the introspective, a mandate to disavow attachment to the impermanent isn’t an impossible ask. Unless and until it applies to the impermanent self. For most, that’s a bridge too long to cross without the crutch of a Hereafter where at least the conscious soul’s permanent.

Because those of us who think deeply about the human condition generally find it difficult to believe in the permanence of any “soul,” we’re left to question whether the human form lottery was worth winning. The acute cognizance of our own mortality very often makes this ostensible gift feel like an unbearable curse.

Acknowledging that human existence is fleeting is one thing (that’s pretty hard to avoid). Coming to terms with it is another. Being at ease with it — to say nothing of being completely unbothered by it — is another still. And understanding it as a gateway to some sort of bliss can seem like a cruel joke.

Whether that friction’s deliberate — part and parcel of the enlightenment project blueprint — often feels beside the point. And I often wonder if the more apt question asks not how we got so lucky as to be statistical miracles (to use Binazir’s framing), but how we managed to be so unlucky as to win this particular lottery.

Most of humanity avoids engaging directly with the fleeting nature of the self, employing various kinds of “faith” to skirt the issue until the bitter end. Harder to avoid are less existential, but more immediate, manifestations of dissatisfaction such as sickness, physical pain, material want or simply the fading of joyous moments.

We tend to calibrate our happiness by way of expectations, which goes a ways towards explaining why Americans aren’t nearly as satisfied with their lives as they “should” be considering the country’s wealth and overall standard of living.

It’s a shallow person destined to suffer who measures self-worth by reference to the material wealth of the richest members of society, but Americans are indoctrinated from birth to do just that.

By definition, a materialistic society’s incapable of recognizing material wealth as inherently impermanent and incapable of providing lasting satisfaction.

Americans are thus doomed to the basest form of dissatisfaction: That which arises from being unable to recognize the vacuousness of materialistic vainglory. Other rich societies are similarly beset.

That’s a tragedy because as the luckless go, it’s a lucky human who was born well-off into an advanced economy, post-1990, which is to say born unburdened by indigence into circumstances conducive to a life as free from physical suffering as modern medicine and technology allow. Have a look:

Across the full sweep of what we generally describe as human “civilization,” fewer than one in 500 people were born post-1990, in an advanced economy and into a household with above-median income.

In simple terms: If you randomly chose 500 humans across 10,000 years of civilization, you’d expect to get just one born recently, in a rich country above that country’s respective median income line. That the odds are that long is made even more striking by the fact that a large share of all humans ever born were born in the modern era.

If those are your circumstances, it doesn’t mean you’re “special,” per se. Nor that you’re a miracle. And I suppose it needs a caveat to account for the increasingly (but still relatively) precarious plight of economically-challenged young adults in advanced economies post-pandemic.

But forgetting sundry laments for America’s “poor” GenZers, being born well-off in a rich country post-1990 means you’re among the luckiest of the cosmically unlucky. In not being compelled to grapple with the harsh realities of destitution, nor any of the onerous circumstances progressively alleviated by medical innovation and communication technology, you’re blessed as beings cursed with hyper-cognizance of their own impermanence go.

I was born in 1983, and I’m not entirely sure my household exceeded the median income threshold in America at the time I was born. So, I don’t technically meet the above-mentioned conditions. But it’s (I’m) close enough. Certainly, my circumstances were such that I was able to enjoy a life mostly free of sickness, physical pain and material want, and where that wasn’t the case, it was the result of my own choices and emotional immaturity.

I assumed the existential suffering that goes along with dwelling on the impermanence of life would get worse as I aged, but I’ve found recently that it seems to be dissipating. So is my off-putting dissatisfaction with mid-life economic circumstances which are enviable on any reasonable standard, and in the richest country history’s ever known.

For all the glory I accord my mid-twenties self, the truth is that 27-year-old me would’ve thought 42-year-old me a god. I would’ve been my idol, but until very recently, that escaped me so completely that I reversed the situation, holding up the younger me as a paragon. Of what, I don’t know.

I can’t account for my newfound enlightenment. At all. It seems to have come out of the blue. Perhaps it’s a function of being steeped daily in tales of economic precarity and unfathomable suffering in war zones around the world. Or maybe it’s just part and parcel of a delayed maturation process.

Whatever it is, I’m grateful for the reprieve. And my suspicion that it’s no exception to the rule that all things are ultimately fleeting makes me all the more appreciative. And determined to enjoy it for as long as it might linger.

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