The Odds Of You Being Here is 1 in 400 Trillion

Why we’ve already won the cosmic lottery

I’ll repeat the title because it really is a staggering statistic! The likelihood of you being born is 1 in 400 trillion.

To put this in perspective, the odds of winning the lottery is 1 in 300 million. So just the odds of you being here is equivalent to winning the lottery not once, not ten times, but over a million times! (1.33 million to be exact). If you’re reading this, you’re already very, very, lucky.

Reasons You’ve Already Won The Cosmic Lottery

If you are currently reading this you are living in an era of incredible advancements in medicine, entertainment, education, technology, cuisine, okay I’m just going to stop because this list could go on indefinitely. The point is, life is much easier today than it was a few centuries, or even generations ago. We don’t have to worry about getting bubonic plague, or dying of a basic bacterial infection like people did before antibiotics were invented in 1928.

Even as recently as 1800, 31% of people did not make it to their 15th birthday! And the people who did survive weren’t exactly binging Netflix waiting for their UberEats to arrive. We live in luxurious times. Not only that, but we also have more time and freedom to enjoy it.

In the past, people’s lives were mostly dictated by survival, leaving little room for hobbies or personal passions, maybe that’s why in old movies and TV shows they were always just sitting around a campfire whittling animals out of sticks. Today we have a lot more free time and resources to pursue our dreams. We can put time into personal development and learn new skills by watching YouTube videos on our comfy couches. The absolute abundance of resources, free information, and mentors is just more proof we’ve won the cosmic lottery.

We are also more connected than any other time in history. The internet has bridged the gap between people, cultures, and ideas, allowing us to Facetime with someone on the other side of the planet anytime we want. We can engage in meaningful conversations with people from different backgrounds, learn about tons of diverse cultures and perspectives, or even just share cute cat videos with each other.

This level of connectivity has opened up a lot of new doors for learning and collaborating as well. Now all the best scientists and scholars in the world can access and build off each other’s work. Instead of traveling for days to a library to find one of the only copies of an obscure text, they can just open Wikipedia and get the information they need practically instantaneously.

Yet with all these benefits we often focus on the one or two things that are going wrong in our lives. Our team doesn’t win the football game, we miss our flight by 2 min, we sell Bitcoin the day before the price goes up. So we complain to our family and friends and say, “Ugh, how am I so unlucky??”

We forget the overwhelming evidence of how lucky we are. Here’s an amazing quote by Brill Bryson that really puts things in perspective,

“Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you.”

So the next time you feel like you’re unlucky, just remember, you’ve won the lottery over a million times already.

Want even more things to feel lucky about? Try running through this daily gratitude exercise:

Or get some inspiration from these great philosophers:

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