Does luck exist?

Stumbling into an article called “Is Luck Real?”, I got thinking about one of my favorite things to think about, which is karma. (Here is a second URL to try.)

(By the way, I’m aware that of some of you won’t have the karma to open this article, sorry about that! I do think I’ve picked out the juiciest bits, though.)

The basic premise is that if the universe is based on cause and effect, which it is, why are things so unpredictable? Why do bad outcomes follow people unprovoked? Why do other people seem to get away with murder? Can we talk about “luck”? After all, as the dictionary definition says:

Luck is success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one’s own actions.

Voltaire once declared that one can locate a cause for everything and thus the word made no sense.

Which may be true if we see cause and effect as simply operating over the course of one lifetime. How can we explain the rolling of the karmic dice in terms of one lifetime? We can’t. It’s not possible to account for the huge variety of otherwise seemingly random and lucky/unlucky occurrences without taking a broader view of cause and effect. To wit, the cause and effect of actions and experiences takes place over more than one lifetime. Many lifetimes, in fact. (More on that here: Unlocking the power of intention.)

The term “luck” can be insulting to a self-made person, who might say indignantly “Hard work and talent brought me here, not luck!” And that may be true, but it is not just the hard work or talent of this life. If it was, then everyone who did that would get the million-dollar mansions, but that patently does not happen.

The missing ingredient

The article tells the story of Holly Davis, beset by seemingly endless bad luck, for whom, “one lousy event would precipitate another.” And she is not alone, of course. But nothing and no one is either punishing or rewarding us. There is nothing magical or supernatural about karma. It is simply the law of cause and effect as applied to the inner world of our intentions causing our experiences.

The article talks about “luck in events that were both significant to us and beyond our control.” On every level, the conventional universe depends on cause and effect, such as gravity and the spinning of atoms; and much of this of course we cannot even see. But, individually – significantly – why one thing happens to you and another thing happens to me depends on the karma we have created. This we can learn to control. The question on our lips, in other words, is not just “Why is this happening?” but “Why is this happening to ME?”

One of the reasons we may not consider karma – other than not having had the karma to find teachings about it – is because we think we already know why things happen. For example, how do I live a healthy life and find financial success? All of us will have theories – exercise, diet, education, talent, hard work, and so on. How can I be popular? By being as attractive or pleasing as I can. And so on. But there is an ingredient missing in all our recipes because there are people who do all the right things but don’t get these outcomes. We can slip in the bath having never taken a risk. We can be really driven but always bankrupt, or have scarcely any work ethic yet the money rolls in. We can be drop dead gorgeous but no one wants to be near us, or as ugly as the back end of a bus with a strong group of caring friends.

What is the missing ingredient? If we want to say, “good luck” or “bad luck”, that is a description rather than an explanation. Buddha explained the causes of good luck as good karma and bad luck as bad karma, the kinds of seeds we have planted in our minds through our actions. If we act out of the wish to make others happy and successful, for example, that’s what will eventually come back to us.

People often attribute their bad luck to something external — in this article Holly attributes it to accepting her grandmother’s rings. Others may attribute it to God. Others to two-faced Lady Luck. Others to being hexed or cursed. Others to walking under a ladder or not throwing the salt. Others to a lucky stuffed animal.

And although “Holly knew there were other explanations — more rational explanations”, I personally have yet to come across any rational explanation for why good things happen to bad people and vice versa, other than the teachings on karma.

Holly was a millennial, born in 1984, conversant in the structural and the systemic, the sweeping explanations undergirding the patterns she could see in the world. She knew she’d benefited from stability, a middle-class childhood, a good education that gave her options for what she could do with her life. She didn’t believe in the supernatural.

All things being equal, Holly did seem to have a lot of bad luck that others in her privileged position managed to avoid. But why? As Venerable Geshe Kelsang says in the book Great Treasury of Merit:

Often when we experience suffering or misfortune we look outside ourself for the cause. For example we may suffer from bad headaches and conclude that they are caused by eating sugar, but while it may be true that we develop headaches whenever we eat sugar, the question we need to ask is “Why does this happen to me and not to others?” If we think about this we will see that the principal cause of our headaches is the ripening of our own negative karma, and that eating sugar is merely a contributory condition. If eating sugar were the main cause of headaches, everyone who ate sugar would suffer from headaches.

If we take happiness away from others, happiness sooner or later disappears from our own life. If we take away their suffering, suffering disappears from our own life.

No such thing as luck?

People may say there is no such thing as luck. In which case, why are we always talking about it — “don’t push your luck”, “I’m down on my luck,” “you lucky bastard”?! Jeff Bezos would apparently ask job interviewees: “Are you a lucky person?” Here are some everyday examples of how often we refer to luck, just taken from the dictionary:

It was just luck that I asked for a job at the right time.
Then I met this gorgeous woman and I couldn’t believe my luck.
She wears a charm that she thinks brings her good luck.
He seems to have had a lot of bad luck in his life.
So your interview’s tomorrow? Good luck!
The best of luck in/with your exams!

The article says that the subject of luck is tacitly off-limits in sociology. This makes sense insofar as without context it could be used to judge people or dismiss the need to help them, eg: “Oh, he was just unlucky. It is not that the system is rigged against him.” Or, alternatively, luck could be used as a mask for privilege.

The way I see it is that, if we want to help, we need to help people understand how to take responsibility for creating good karma and not bad, thus addressing the underlying causes of their good and bad luck. And at the same time we also need to be creating good karma ourselves by helping others in all sorts of external ways, such as giving them what they need and making things fairer. If we want to receive the things we need and to live in a fair world ourselves, we can create the causes for that by helping others. Karma is therefore not an excuse for passivity; it is quite the opposite.

Some people get away with murder!  

The thing is, we never get away with anything, thanks to karma. If we don’t purify our negativity, we will have to experience its effects. I’m a fan of the Sci-fi series Black Mirror; it has helped my renunciation and compassion quite a lot. In an episode called USS Callister (spoiler alert), the sadistic spaceship captain who has been torturing actual sentient people in his warped egocentric simulation ends up circling in space on his own in a dark capsule for pretty much all time. No matter how often he pleads, “End game!” he can no longer leave his own samsaric creation. He has run out of merit and he doesn’t have the wisdom.

No matter how long we seem to get away with being mean, or using our power to be cruel and humiliating, it catches up with us sooner or later. From this point of view, those who inflict pain on others are even more needing of our compassion than their victims. This is because, as it says in the scriptures, the victims are exhausting the effects of their negative karma, whereas the perpetrator is ignorantly making themselves a hell.

Your comments are welcome! And this is continued here: What goes around comes around.