We are the lucky ones

I recently learned that one of the hiring questions at Optimizely is “on a scale of 1-10, how lucky are you?”

CEO Dan Siroker writes “Warren Buffett likes to say he won the ovarian lottery. If he had been born into another era he might have been some animal’s lunch.”

This is a great question, even outside of a hiring interview. Almost all of us are incredibly lucky, and when I put my life in the context of the entire breadth of possible human experiences, I cannot give anything but a 10 as an answer to the above stated question.

There’s the luck of having been born in the first place. Richard Dawkins put it best in his timeless and now famous opening lines to his book Unweaving The Rainbow:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

Then there’s the luck of having been born at the right time. It’s hinted at in Warren Buffet’s quote. Sure, being some animal’s lunch is bad enough, but keep in mind that if you entered a time machine and were sent back to a random point in time, there would be worse destinations than the dinner table of a lion in the Serengeti. You could have been thrown into the throes of slavery, famines, wars, diseases. There’s little doubt that almost any period of humanity before after the second world war was by and large an experience of physical terror, with a never-ending threat of death and violence. And it’s easy to forget in the affluent world that billions still live in this emotional landscape.

And this brings me to the third type of luck: the luck of having been born in the right place. I don’t know where you, dear Reader, are reading this from, but chances are you are not currently in the Central African Republic. I recently came across the opening remarks by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, at a press conference during her mission to the Central African Republic. Don’t continue reading if you are light headed.

This has become a country where people are not just killed, they are tortured, mutilated, burned and dismembered – sometimes by spontaneous mobs as well as by organized groups of armed fighters. Children have been decapitated, and we know of at least four cases where the killers have eaten the flesh of their victims.

Elsewhere, people apprehended with blood on their machetes and severed body parts in their hands, have been allowed to go free, because there is nowhere to detain them, and no means to charge them with the crimes they have clearly committed.

This is happening now, in 2014. Think about this for a minute.

We cannot give birth to the Dawkinsian unborn ghosts, nor can we help those who had to endure misery in the past. We may, to some extent, even feel helpless in the face of misery in distant parts of the world. The very least we can do is to be grateful for just how incredibly lucky we are.