I’ve been thinking about a lot of different ideas for this newsletter lately. Although I launched this Substack a while ago, I’m still trying to find my feet when it comes to what I’m writing about. What I do know is that I’m endlessly curious about people, and I’m guessing if you’re here, you are too.
So I’ve decided to work in seasons for The Curiosity Dispatch, to focus in on a subject for a period of time while not restricting myself to write about one thing forever.
This season of The Curiosity Dispatch is all about community. Join me to explore some of the impacts community—or lack thereof—has in our lives.
The first episode of the community season is about luck.
“You always land on your feet”
Some time ago I was expressing a concern to my ex-husband. I don’t remember what it was specifically, but the context was likely me worrying about my ability to afford a cost related to our son. We don’t generally talk about our personal lives unless it’s an update that is relevant to our shared parenting.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You’re a lucky person. You always land on your feet.”
This statement stunned me. By many factors, I’m not lucky at all. I grew up in poverty and [childhood trauma redacted because that’s a whole ‘nother subject]. I’m divorced and have multiple chronic illnesses that make life challenging on a daily basis. I’ve had housing insecurity and I’ve been single for years. Life has often been extremely hard for reasons largely out of my control that would suggest I’m rather unlucky.
Yet my ex-husband, who has known me since I was 19 years old, thinks I’m a lucky person. And as I thought about it more, I realised that I agree with him. I have been extremely lucky in my life. What gives?
Good fortune or adversity
Part of the reason it took a while for me to accept this idea of myself as a lucky person has to do with what we define as luck. Often it’s perceived as a nebulous, chance occurrence.
Imagine the rain stops when you’re ready to leave the house in the morning and on your way to work you see a $100 bill on the footpath. By stepping aside to pick the note up you narrowly avoid being hit by a car. The charming barista at the coffee cart on the corner gives you a free oat latte because someone ordered it and then left. You continue your walk and as you pass your favourite store you see that the jacket you’ve been eyeing up has just gone on sale for $100, and when you wear it the next day you meet the love of your life. That’s an inexplicably fortunate series of chance occurrences.
While that particular scenario is unlikely, those sorts of pleasant coincidences are often what we think of when we say ‘lucky’.
On the flipside is the person with bad luck who doesn’t take their umbrella and it starts raining on that walk to work. They’re the one who loses their $100 bill, or who pays for that latte, only to get an urgent phone call about their ailing uncle and leave before collecting it. The unlucky person is the one driving the car that narrowly misses a pedestrian and crashes into a fire hydrant, and finds out their car insurance has lapsed.
Merriam-Webster defines luck as a force that brings good fortune or adversity. Luck is commonly perceived as something that is synonymous with chance. The superstitious view of luck is that it is a force that can be influenced by ritual, whether that’s with prayer, throwing salt over your shoulder, or wearing a particular colour. Even those of us who claim to not be superstitious will ‘cross fingers’ or ‘touch wood’. According to psychology luck is more about perception and connectedness than it is about something random happening to you.
Taking it a step further, luck is a skill you can learn and a resource that you can build.
The more people you know, the luckier you are
A 1967 experiment by Stanley Milgram (yes, the psychologist at the helm of the famous electric shock obedience study) tested the ‘small-world theory’ by asking participants to get a parcel to a stockbroker in Boston by sending the parcel only to people they were on first name terms with, who would then forward it on to someone they knew. This experiment was the origin of the concept of ‘six degrees of separation’ (although Milgram did not use the term himself) as the experimenters found there tended to be just six people needed to link two complete strangers—each participant and the stockbroker.
Decades later, psychologist Richard Wiseman set out to repeat the study in the UK, this time having participants send the parcel to an events organiser in Cheltenham named Katie. Wiseman and his colleagues found that there tended to be four people linking their volunteers to Katie.
The bit that I’m most interested in is the question Wiseman and his team asked participants before the experiment began, when they asked each volunteer to rate their general level of luckiness.
Out of an initial one hundred people who volunteered to take part, 38 people didn’t send the parcel to anyone. The vast majority of these people had rated themselves as unlucky. why would they stop at the first task, when they had gone to the effort to volunteer for the study in the first place? The researchers asked for feedback, and the majority of those 38 people said that they couldn’t think of anyone they were on first name terms with who could help get the parcel to Katie.
These studies suggest that the more people you know, the more likely you are to experience the ‘small-world phenomenon’. Wiseman suggests this connectedness leads to more opportunities and increases people’s perception of being lucky. If you know more people it stands to reason that your network facilitates more opportunities.
This fits with my own experience of luck, and is what I think my ex-husband was referring to when he said I always land on my feet.
I don’t experience random luck, but I know a lot of people and I do experience kindness and community. My network of friends has helped me out with getting jobs, finding housing, tagging me in opportunities on Facebook, with childcare, with money when I had car problems, or meals when my leg was in a cast. I had never thought about these things as luck before, because they’re not random chance, but I did think of myself as being fortunate, which amounts to much the same thing.
It’s not that I have been offered an amazing job while walking down the street, it’s that people who know me have vouched for me when I’ve applied for a job. It’s not that I’ve won a raffle for a food parcel, it’s that I have friends who care enough to help out when I’m vulnerable. This all combines to make me feel lucky, even if it’s beyond the dictionary definition.
You can increase your luck by building your community.
Pay more attention and get lucky
If one part of the luck equation is having networks that bring about opportunities, another part is learning to spot the opportunities. Community building is a long-term project and something that is daunting for many people. In the short term, you can learn to see opportunity and create your own luck.
In another study by Richard Wiseman, he said, “I gave some volunteers a newspaper and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. What I didn’t tell them was that halfway through the newspaper I had placed an unexpected opportunity. This ‘opportunity’ took up half of the page and announced, in huge type, ‘Win £100 by telling the experimenter you have seen this.’ The unlucky people tended to be so focused on the counting of the photographs that they failed to notice the opportunity. In contrast, the lucky people were more relaxed, saw the bigger picture, and spotted a chance to win 100. It was a simple demonstration of how lucky people can create their good fortune by being more able to make the most of an unexpected opportunity.”
The Roman philosopher Seneca (apparently) said, “luck is when preparation meets opportunity”, so the idea of being open to and ready for opportunities is not a new one. Wiseman believes our own perception of how lucky or unlucky we are can inform our experience of luck. This is borderline woo-woo for me; it’s giving The Secret. Think yourself lucky and make it so.
However, it does make sense that if we believe we are lucky, we are more likely to notice opportunities and be ready to use them. Less a bogus law of attraction, or an atheist’s positive-thinking self-help prayer, more an awareness of what’s around us.
The intersection of luck and privilege
Of course, notions of luck and opportunity are not straightforward. These studies don’t seem to allow for the fact that discrimination is real. I’m a cishet white woman so I have a lot of privilege, despite the poverty, trauma, and illness I carry. These are basic facts that grant me opportunities that a queer person or person of colour might not receive.
It’s like when Kerry Washington’s character Mia yells at Reese Witherspoon’s Elena in Little Fires Everywhere: “You didn’t make good choices, you had good choices.”
It’s not necessarily that someone spots good opportunities, it’s that they had good opportunities. The circumstances you are born into are outside of your control and greatly influence the opportunities you might be presented with, as well as your ability to make the most of them.
Resilience and optimism
As someone who doesn’t have close family living nearby or a financial safety net, the social support network I have built over the years is the only thing that keeps me from going out of my mind with anxiety, and has sometimes literally stood between me and disaster.
For example, years ago when I was on the solo parent’s benefit (what luck, that I was born in a country with social welfare) I was sick for a week. This meant that I was unable to do the cleaning work I did to make a bit of extra income, to stretch the minimal amount the benefit provided. It also happened to coincide with my benefit being cut, for no apparent reason (what bad luck, to lose both my sources of income at the same time).
I had literally no money, because I barely made it week to week as it was. I needed to feed my son, and I didn’t want to ask his Dad for help, because he would use it against me. (Of course I would never have let him go hungry.)
When I called Work and Income, they said that I didn’t attend a required appointment about my benefit. I said that I hadn’t even received notice that I had to attend an appointment. On further investigation in their system, they realised that was true, and reinstated my benefit.
In the meantime, my community rallied. Friends brought us meals, groceries, and vouchers for groceries and petrol. They immediately stepped in to help when the government failed. I didn’t have family to lean on and I didn’t have any savings, but I felt incredibly lucky.
I still live a precarious existence, even though I earn a lot more these days. Rent is so expensive that I don’t get a chance to build up any substantial savings, and I don’t have a partner or family who can step in to pay the bills if I’m sick and can’t work. But I know that we will never be without shelter and we will never go hungry, because we know many people who care.
So is luck objective? I felt lucky (in fact I felt overwhelmed with gratitude and definitely cried) when I was given food. But objectively it seems like bad luck to have reached that point in the first place. There does seem to be an element of perception here.
Wiseman says people who consider themselves lucky “tend to be — surprise surprise — optimists, and they’re also very resilient to bad things that happen. If bad things happen, it’s thinking, ‘Okay, it could have been worse,’ rather than ‘It could have been better’.”
Frankly, I dislike the whole concept of resilience. The idea that an individual suffers and survives and is then congratulated for resilience, when it would be infinitely better to not need to suffer in the first place, when the systems that create the suffering should be dismantled, is gross to me in a way that I can’t fully articulate. (Planned and intentional community resilience is another matter—that is worth praise and effort.)
While community brings opportunities that can be described as luck, it seems to also be true that being open-minded, attentive, and optimistic can also increase our perception of luck. Which—minor woo-woo alert—may work out to increase good fortune itself.
Do you consider yourself a lucky person?
"It’s like when Kerry Washington’s character Mia yells at Reese Witherspoon’s Elena in Little Fires Everywhere: “You didn’t make good choices, you had good choices.” "
Oh this line made me shiver when I watched that show. Such great delivery by Washington ❤️
Great read, thank you. You've given me a lot to think about; I've considered myself quite unlucky lately, but actually can think of several examples where things have worked out because the stars have aligned within my network.