When I started learning how to ski, I was a natural. My ski school classmates included many athletic adults, and yet I dominated the group. I started whizzing down the Blue slope on my own on the fourth day, my confidence at its zenith. It was on my second to last run of the day when I came hurtling down the slope, crashed into a snowboarder, and tore a ligament in my knee. My streak of perfection ended, I was relegated to the ski lodge for the rest of the trip. I haven’t really gotten the hang of it since.
I am addicted to the physical feeling of momentum, of moving fast in the right direction. But I’m even more addicted to the psychological feeling of momentum, of having Fortune on my side. You know the feeling. It is the feeling of being blessed. You make your three pointers. The wind blows your hair in a sexy way as you coast on your bike. You manage to pull off a split on the dance floor. In these moments of flow, success feels inevitable and effortless. It’s also noticeable to other people. You ooze luckiness. At my last job, my boss, a bit of a hiring savant, told me that he’d given a candidate with slightly less good capabilities an offer because they seemed like “they have a hot hand right now and I want that for us.” When you have momentum and luck, everyone wants to be around you in case it’s contagious.
The opposite of feeling lucky is feeling burnt out. Burnout is the feeling of suffering that comes from having no agency over your outcomes, despite doing everything right. You line up the shot perfectly but nothing goes into the pocket. The wind blows the smell of dead fish and sand into your face as you trudge uphill on your bike. When you’re feeling this way, even your objective successes look like failures to everyone around you: you make it up the hill on your bike, sure, but you’re sweaty and grouchy instead of being cool and sexy. People can tell when you’re burnt out and assume that you’re just negative or incompetent.
It may seem ridiculous to believe in forces like luck. I used to think that believing in luck was for my hyper-superstitious father and ancient Greeks. I used to think it was a way of making excuses for one’s bad actions – “I wasn’t lucky” seems like a way to cede personal responsibility to some great unknown fate. But as I’ve grown, I have realized that it doesn’t have to be that way. Believing in “luck” is really about creating a shorthand for our existence within complicated systems. It is undeniable that there are factors beyond our control that determine our outcomes, even in the most scientific and rational universe. It is possible for someone to be excellent in action and their timing and fortune to simply be off. By believing in luck, we succumb to a natural instinct to narrativize our lives. It gives a name to that which is beyond our control. It doesn’t actually matter if luck is just a shorthand for a complex systemic phenomenon that we do not have the tools to model and predict. In Neil Gaiman’s book American Gods, the main character, “wonders whether lightning in the sky was from a magical thunderbird or just an atmospheric discharge, or whether the two ideas were, on some level, the same thing. And of course they were. That was the point after all.”
We’re in a cultural moment where we want to believe in these forces, maybe in reaction to the hyperrationality of the previous cultural era. J. Walter Thompson’s 2016 Intelligence Group’s trend report said: “We are increasingly turning to unreality as a form of escape and a way to search for other kinds of freedom, truth and meaning. What emerges is an appreciation for magic and spirituality, the knowingly unreal, and the intangible aspects of our lives that defy big data and the ultra-transparency of the web.” We see this embrace of magic and spirituality show up in our generation’s newfound love for astrology, in a desire for more religion and alignment with religious identity, and in an increasing embrace of “holistic care.” It’s happened before: the Enlightenment in the 18th century emphasized science, and the Romantic movement that followed emphasized the whimsical, natural, and the supernatural.
Believing in luck is oddly empowering. It gives you a satisfying feeling, not unlike color coding your files, to take life’s random events and make sense of them as a narrative. I realized the powerful effects of this belief when I entered my first real period of burnout. After a charmed life of getting great grades and making close friends, I started to slowly roll downhill during my second year of university. Within a three month period, I had to move into a basement, I found black mold and MULTIPLE snakes in my bedroom (!), a friend got assaulted, I started to have head-splittingly bad migraines, I got a horrible grade, my friend transferred universities, and I blamed myself for my inability to support her. Things got worse and worse. It became freeing to believe in luck, that my fate was also the result of a spin of fortune’s wheel. It allowed me to take action instead of torturing myself for my mistakes. And when fortune’s wheel spun for me once again, I savored the delightful feeling of having the universe on my side without believing that I was entitled to its favorable view of me.
We live in cycles of boom and bust, feast and famine, birth and rebirth, of luck and burnout. These days, I have experienced many cycles of both momentum and burnout and can take them with a bit more equanimity. Luck – the fortune of it – is a time to make hay while the sun shines and take advantage of the opportunity as quickly as possible. Burnout – the misfortune of it – is a time to hold outcomes lightly. I am not a different person than I was while lucky, my circumstances have merely changed. I now use my times of luck to rejoice in the feeling of effortlessness. I try to use the lucky times to put myself on the right path, to cushion the blows during dark moments of misfortune. And during misfortune, I chase the feeling of calm, effortless action that will lead me back to “luckiness” after a period of burnout.
As the Daoist texts describe the feeling of returning to luckiness:
There is a [luckiness]; naturally residing within;
One moment it goes, the next it comes,
And no one is able to conceive of it.
If you lose it you are inevitably disordered;
If you attain it you are inevitably well ordered.
Diligently clean out its lodging place;
And its vital essence will naturally arrive.
Still your attempts to imagine and conceive of it.
Relax your efforts to reflect on and control it.
Be reverent and diligent
And its vital essence will naturally stabilize.