Illustration: Albert Tercero
H
olly Davis didn’t believe in luck until she realized just how unlucky she was. Then she couldn’t quite shake it, this sense of having an anti-Midas touch, bad outcomes following her unprovoked. Often, it was the little things. Reservations she made disappeared. Rides she booked never came. Someone else would fill out an annoying but vital online form without a hitch; the site would crash as soon as she tried. Her neighbors’ plants glowed a lustrous green while hers — same soil, same rain — shriveled with disease.
She knew it sounded crazy, but it all started when she accepted her grandmother’s rings. She was 21, graduating college and getting engaged to her freshman-year sweetheart. They’d both double-majored in sociology and women’s studies. Now they were moving to Portland, Oregon, looking for jobs and housing. Second-hand engagement rings were considered bad luck, but she didn’t give it much thought. To her, that was nonsense — and it wasn’t like she had much money to buy rings of her own.
Almost immediately, there was acrimony when other relatives grew jealous that Davis had gotten these heirlooms. One lousy event would precipitate another. The job she found in Portland was at a halfway house for sex offenders. It sounds hyperbolic, but somehow, at the time, she always felt like she was the person on duty when a resident came home high on meth or wielding a knife, or when the bosses ordered a room search, which meant she was the one looking under mattresses and pulling back soiled sheets, rummaging for contraband cigarettes and porn. “I was always the member of staff that ended up with jizz on them,” she said. “And it was always on days when I would wear my nicest sweater, or a nice handmade scarf, and then it was like, ‘Great, I’ve got to go handwash this.’”
Her romantic relationships followed the same rule. A grad-school acceptance in sociology at the University of Edinburgh pulled her out of the halfway house, and her fiancé followed her only for him to declare Scotland “the land that God forgot” and move back to his parents’ basement. Years later, she married a Scot — again, using her grandma’s rings — only for the British government to impose an income requirement for spousal visas that neither she nor her new warehouse-worker husband could meet. Their relationship fell apart. She’d get into the car, ask if he might turn down the screamo, “and his response would be to turn it all the way up to the point of, like, almost blowing the speakers out.”
She knew there were other explanations — more rational explanations. The halfway house was chronically underfunded and understaffed; the work was rough and dirty for everyone. The suite of failed relationships might’ve been a product of her own psychology, the trend of failed bookings a product of inattention. And yet. It felt like there was something else.
She started wondering whether the rings were hexed. She talked about it the way you might tell a ghost story — as an outlandish dinner-party anecdote you can’t help laughing about but also, in some secret, inadmissible part of your soul, can’t fully discount. Her grandmother had been volatile: a Hungarian Canadian bombshell with black hair, red lipstick, and a personality disorder that went undiagnosed until her 80s. She had a tempestuous second marriage to a soft-spoken man who painted portrait after portrait of the same female figure — decidedly not his wife — whom he described only as “the woman of my dreams.” Ask him about his life in Hungary, and his answers had a quicksilver quality, hard to pin down. Then, once he died, stories started coming out. There was a cupboard, which he’d usually kept locked, full of Nazi memorabilia: swastikas, military maps, gold teeth. There were secret bank accounts for sending money back to relatives in the Old Country, which he’d stashed in secret compartments he had made by cutting holes into the pages of books. There were divorce filings that he’d never finished filling out. True or mythologized, it was hard to say for sure. Still. Marital lies, possible collaboration with the Third Reich — the rings could be carrying an “intergenerational family karma curse.” It made a certain kind of sense.
It also made no sense at all. Davis was a sociologist, level-headed in her views. Her work was filled with references to redlining and deindustrialization, mandatory sentencing and welfare reform. She’d left behind her parents’ Catholicism. She 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.
Was this just adulthood, she wondered, to be waging an endless war against the everyday, your clothes stained and your efforts foiled? Was this normal? The man who would eventually become her second husband didn’t think so, and he knew a thing or two about luck. He’d written a master’s thesis about it, and a 122-page doctoral dissertation, and had co-edited a volume called The Philosophy of Luck. His name was Lee John Whittington, she’d met him on Tinder, and he didn’t believe in the salt-throwing, new-engagement-ring-buying sort of luck, either. At least in most cases he didn’t. Though he too laughed about it, hedged about it, he came to see his wife as the exception, a living counterargument to his philosophizing. He sometimes joked she was the unluckiest person he’d ever met.
In 2020, a professor at the University of Iowa named Michael Sauder noticed that one subject was tacitly off-limits in sociology. No matter how hard you looked, the literature was curiously silent about luck. There was an exception, he found, that seemed to prove the rule. Some 50 years earlier, a team of Harvard sociologists had published a lightning rod of an academic tome called Inequality. Access to good schools was important, its authors argued, but education alone couldn’t close the country’s divides; to do that, your best bet was to redistribute income.
Inequality was, to put it mildly, controversial. But one of the most contentious bits — rivaling even the socialist policy proposal — was the suggestion that some differences were attributable to sheer luck: “chance acquaintances who steer you to one line of work rather than another, the range of jobs that happen to be available in a particular community when you are job hunting” — the myriad little twists that have a big effect on a life. Other sociologists were not so sure. Luck was invoked in only a handful of the book’s 400 or so pages but was mentioned 15 times in the American Journal of Sociology’s review. Such assertions were “merely speculations about the unexplained variance, not findings.” It generated such blowback that the lead author later said he regretted using the word at all.
The idea was still pissing people off decades later. When the Cornell economist and columnist Robert H. Frank appeared on a Fox Business talk show in 2009 to talk about the importance of luck in economic success, the British-born host wasted no time before telling him off: “Do you know how insulting that was when I read that? I came to America with nothing 35 years ago. I’ve made something of myself, I think through hard work, talent, and risk-taking, and you’re going to write that this is luck.”
There’s something about luck that inspires skepticism or rejoinder. Partially, it’s a question of terms. It’s hard to agree what exactly we’re talking about. The word is slippery, a kind of linguistic Jell-O. The critiques come from left and right, from those who see luck as a mask for privilege and those who see it as an offense to self-made men. Voltaire, with the confidence of the encyclopedist, once declared that one can locate a cause for everything and thus the word made no sense. Others dismiss it as mere statistics, still others as simply a term the godless use for God. It can call to mind an austere medieval manuscript, two-faced Fortuna, one side beaming, the other weeping, ordinary humans clinging to her fickle wheel.
But we can’t quite quit it, either. It’s something you might say you don’t believe in but continuously invoke. We’re up all night to get it, are warned not to push it, are sometimes down on it. It haunts our pop songs and expressions, but it isn’t just some rhetorical holdover, like the bony stub of an ancestral tail. This organ is still in active use. Months before he narrowly survived an assassination attempt, a Washington Post op-ed called Donald Trump “the luckiest politician who ever lived”; just two days before he arrived in Butler, Pennsylvania, a columnist at the National Review wondered whether he had a “desk drawer full of four-leaf clovers in his office at Mar-a-Lago.”
In the tech world, managers ask about it in job interviews. “Are you a lucky person?” was reportedly one of Jeff Bezos’s favorite questions in the early days of Amazon. Now it’s common enough that some college career centers warn students to have an answer prepared. One year at Goldman Sachs, a superior in charge of hiring entry-level analysts divided the résumés he’d gotten into two piles at random, the way you might cut a deck of cards. Then he threw one pile out, saying, “You have to be lucky in this business. We might as well pick from the lucky ones.” According to a Goldman Sachs spokesperson, this story is almost certainly apocryphal — but it keeps getting told, a parable for how luck figures in supposedly meritocratic outcomes.
For Frank, the Cornell economist, it was the difference between life and death. After an episode of sudden cardiac arrest on the tennis court, his survival depended on the fluke of an ambulance being nearby, having been dispatched to a car accident that involved no serious injuries, allowing those EMTs to scoot a few hundred yards to get to him. In true economist fashion, he saw in his brush with death a force that plays a vital role in markets. A globalized world makes competition fiercer, such that even meaningless variation — which product happens to get a good online review first, say — can have enormous impacts.
Over the last 20 years, sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers have been looking at it, too. In a way, they’re responding to a need. We live in an era of boundless data, an empiricist’s fantasy. Apps count our steps and track our breaths. Websites watch our scrolls and clicks. Scientists trace the viruses and chemicals that get flushed with our urine and feces. We recognize the structural forces at play in our lives, the long tail of history and policy swishing around in the everyday. Our world should be at its most analyzable, explicable — but still it can feel like sorcery. That a hurricane’s path was plotted by satellite and dropsonde, radar and big-data modeling doesn’t dull the eeriness of one house destroyed and its neighbor still standing.
“As social scientists, we have our own demons circling the edges of our enlightenment campfire, reminding us that there are aspects of social processes that we will never be able to account for,” wrote Sauder in a paper called “The Sociology of Luck.” He was urging his colleagues to peer into the darkness, to reopen the forbidden chamber Inequality had cracked way back in 1972. All sorts of forces help explain the world — race and class, gender and geography, redlining and Reaganomics — but they were never entirely sufficient. There were always ripples of randomness within those vast tidal currents, as Washington University in St. Louis sociologist Mark Rank put it after joining the party with his own luck book in 2024, The Random Factor. Luck might draw attention to the limits of a field’s methods, but that wasn’t a good reason to ignore it. To Sauder, luck was real — not an “explanatory junk drawer” for anything that a sociologist’s model couldn’t explain but something specific and consequential that needed to be studied.
“The one dimension of personal luck that transcends all others is to have been born in a highly developed country,” Frank writes, and by that account Whittington was extremely lucky. He was born middle-class in England to parents who worked in pharmaceuticals, the kind of parents who could coach him toward good grades after he skipped every biology class one year to smoke up in a friend’s basement listening to Cradle of Filth. To him and others in philosophy, though, that wasn’t luck per se. Those details were so instrumental in determining the course of his life that changing them would require a cascade of other changes. If he’d been born in a different country, or to a different set of parents, or into a different class, would he even be himself?
Like many luck scholars, Whittington had stumbled on it by chance. In 2009, he was a master’s student in philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire, outside London, staring down a meeting about the subject for his thesis when he happened upon a BBC article about the Monopoly World Championships. That sounds like complete bullshit, he thought. Sure, there might be strategies to boost your chances of winning, but the gameplay depends largely on rolling the dice. The whole point was trying to make your way in a fiction where luck wasn’t just afoot but made visible.
Whittington is a meanderer by nature, prone to following tangents and seeing where they lead. He logged on to PhilPapers, his field’s answer to Google, where he quickly found a 2008 paper called “What Luck is Not.” It was a riposte to other thinkers who, in the early aughts, had tried to come up with a coherent definition of what we mean when we talk about luck. This paper explained the two predominant accounts in order to tear them both apart.
The first account saw luck in events that were both significant to us and beyond our control. Imagine two drunk drivers, one who kills a pedestrian and another who is swerving just as wildly but on an empty road. The first might go to jail for manslaughter. The other might receive no more punishment than waking up the next morning with a hangover. To thinkers like Thomas Nagel, this discrepancy — “moral luck” — signals a paradox. Our intuition tells us we can’t be blamed for what isn’t our fault, yet our circumstances are impossible to untangle from our actions and their fallout. Some contemporary philosophers took up that idea of luck, elucidating a concept their predecessors had used but not fully defined.
More evocative to Whittington was the second account of luck, this one about fragility, how easily things could have turned out differently. Take the example of a piano falling on your head. All of the pieces that had to align for that to happen form an intricate Rube Goldberg machine of ifs. If the stairwell hadn’t been a quarter inch too narrow to fit this baby grand. If the movers hadn’t decided to hoist it by pulley. If the ropes hadn’t been frayed just enough to fail but not so much that they were obviously unusable. If you hadn’t passed below at just the wrong time. The world in which you emerge unscathed is razor close. (The thought experiment sounds absurd. Yet think of the cellist from the Electric Light Orchestra killed in 2010 by a 1,300-pound hay bale that rolled out of nowhere and crushed him in his car.)
One might analyze such an event through the lens of probabilities. But Whittington hated the image of our brains as machinelike calculators for uncertainty. What drew him to the “fragile worlds” account was a belief that our minds run less on math, more on stories. “When I think about luck, it fundamentally becomes an imaginative activity,” he said — the act of visualizing worlds that might’ve been and still might be.
A defense of the “possible worlds” account of luck became his Ph.D. dissertation at Edinburgh — but toward the end of his degree, his father was diagnosed with cancer, and during his postdoc, he died. There had been times when his dad had been difficult. Once, instead of telling Whittington off for leaving dishes unwashed, he’d slipped them still sticky into his son’s bed. But they had been close. They’d gone to see Rammstein and Tool together. They had spent hours and hours talking about luck — at the dinner table, at the pub, at the whiteboard in his parents’ house — his dad asking question after question, listening, defending a more probabilistic approach, listening again.
Now, his dad was gone, and in that moment, none of the work seemed to matter. He had no stomach for academia’s petty politics and abstractions. He stuck out the postdoc and then he left, went traveling. When he got back to Edinburgh, he wasn’t sure whether to stay, so he played a little game. If he could find a flat and a job in the next five days, this would be home for a bit. If not, he’d move on.
He found a rundown apartment and a receptionist job in a youth hostel. He matched on Tinder with a sociology postdoc named Holly Davis. She loved breeding chickens for egg color, crossing French Marans with Andalusians for deep green, Easter-eggers with leghorns for mint or pale blue. She was taking both burlesque and mixed-martial-arts classes. She liked bringing her students to a strip club so they could learn how to do ethnographic research.
Whittington and Davis became friends. She was wary after dating another guy off Tinder who’d turned out to be a creep. Whittington started staying over, but chastely. Finally, after a few months, while he was visiting his mother for Christmas, she asked him over the phone if he wanted to “move beyond platonic.” He did. Then her car broke down on New Year’s Eve, and they spent their first official date as a couple waiting for the tow truck.
Whenever Whittington told anyone at Hertfordshire what he was researching, they always said the same thing: Talk to Richard Wiseman. Wiseman was a big name on campus, a psychologist who had, in the 1990s and early aughts, recruited a bunch of categorically lucky or unlucky people as research volunteers. The pseudonymous Patricia, for instance, was 27 and a star-crossed flight attendant. One plane she was on had to make an impromptu landing because passengers were belligerently drunk. Another was struck by lightning. A third was grounded for a different emergency. She had survived so far, but all her attempts at dating were doomed, and she avoided friends who were about to take exams or do job interviews lest they be infected by her miasma of failure. Wiseman’s lucky volunteers, in contrast, had successful careers, satisfying marriages, a lifetime of doorways fortuitously opened in front of them.
Was there any truth in these self-perceptions? To find out, Wiseman subjected them to a series of experiments. In one, he asked people to page through a newspaper and report how many pictures it contained. It was a trick. On the second page, he’d written, “Stop counting — there are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” On another: “Stop counting, tell the experimenter you’ve seen this and win $250.” The unlucky among his volunteers were less likely to notice those messages than their lucky counterparts: They were too anxious to see opportunity and good fortune staring them in the face.
It’s no surprise that Wiseman started his career as a magician. In his view, luck was little more than illusion, a kind of psychological sleight of hand. Wiseman’s The Luck Factor, from 2003, would become perhaps the most famous entry in a subgenre of self-help. There’s How Luck Happens, from 2018; The Science of Being Lucky, from 2019; and Conscious Luck, from 2020, to name a few. By looking for and seizing opportunity, the argument often goes, luck is something you can make yourself. This has a Hallmarkian neatness, at once attractive and frustrating. As Whittington saw it, it was fine as pop psychology, potentially even helpful, but it carried a Pollyanna-ish, moralizing overtone, as if every sling and arrow were of your own making. Sometimes shit just happened that wasn’t your fault.
Davis was a case in point. Four or five months into their relationship, they were in her cottage in Fife doing some administrative task online. Whittington did it for himself with no issue, but when Davis tried, there was roadblock after roadblock, glitch after glitch. The form would reset itself. Eventually, the whole site would crash. “What the actual hell?” Whittington couldn’t help but say. “You are the unluckiest human being I have ever met.” In his philosophical work, luck was a quality of events, not of people; it denoted the fragility of outcomes, not something that clings to you. And yet. Davis’s car had just been totaled by a van driver, not her doing. The latest brood of eggs she’d incubated had yielded 12 males and one female — the chicken version of a truly lousy hand. She’d have to rehome most of them; with a small yard, she couldn’t keep that many roosters without them squabbling among themselves and harassing the hens.
Was he serious? He knew luck; if that’s what it looked like to him, she thought, then maybe that’s what was wrong with her. She hadn’t used “the L-word” for it, but she knew she was misadventure prone, subject to Murphy’s Law more than most. She’d even gone so far as to get rid of her grandmother’s rings after her first marriage dissolved, leaving them with her mom in Wisconsin. But when her mother started talking about getting them resized, something in Davis protested. Maybe the rings had cooled down, she thought. Or perhaps she wanted them in the way we often want what feels a little dangerous. She took them back.
The couple kept feeling the rings’ force, at once malevolent and a little absurd. In Davis’s sociology studies, she’d had luck finding sex workers to interview for her master’s thesis, and pimps for her dissertation, but try as she might, the johns at the center of her postdoc research just would not talk. She’d managed to piss off some people in her department. She was cynical about finding a job at the end of the master’s-Ph.D.-postdoc tunnel. She left academia, too.
So began a footloose few years of bouncing around Europe, of trying on various lives, every juncture a dice roll. In Hungary, they would have to abandon their plans to open a hostel. In Spain, Davis would be diagnosed with a rare spine-fusing condition called ankylosing spondylitis that could make it excruciating to move. In England, she and Whittington would have to leave a hotel because they dared ask a second time for a refill of the coffee pods in their room.
What are the chances? That a lapsed luck philosopher meets an unluckiness magnet on Tinder and falls for her? That she falls for him? That she gets diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis? That they lose their accommodations over a coffee-pod dispute? It was the question Whittington the philosopher was initially pushing against. The ankylosing spondylitis could feel like luck in terms of both probability and possibility. Between 0.2 and 0.5 percent of Americans are thought to have it: a short stick Davis easily could not have drawn. Clear data is a bit harder to come by on ejection from hotels on coffee-related grounds. How much does that depend on the guest’s demeanor, the manager’s mood?
The trouble is that even when we know the chances of chance events, we’re lousy at understanding them. Flip a coin a bunch of times. As soon as you start seeing heads over and over again, you start imagining that tails must be next — and when it isn’t, your spine tingle gets a little more pronounced, as if you’re witnessing a tiny miracle rather than a very predictable sort of unpredictability. This is the gambler’s fallacy: mistakenly thinking that one coin toss has any power or influence over the next. You can feel that instinct at play when looking at this string of 60 digits, courtesy of the mathematician Joseph Mazur:
458391843333834534555555555555185803245032174022234935499238
The first thing that hits our eyes is that long string of fives. That seems significant, too many repeats to be without meaning. But the digits are randomly generated. We do the same thing in images, finding faces in clouds and Rorschach blots. We create narrative links between unrelated events.
But not always. There are surprising patterns that are in fact patterns. In the 1980s, when Larry Bird was on fire, swishing basket after basket, some eminent psychologists debunked such lucky streaks. Analyzing Philadelphia 76ers games, Boston Celtics free throws, and some shooting experiments set up with Cornell’s varsity team seemed to show that the outcome of one shot was independent of the last. The Larry Bird effect, the professors declared, was an illusion — a cognitive mistake. Athletes and fans didn’t believe it for a second. They knew the hot hand was real. They’d seen it with their own eyes or felt it with their own fingertips.
Then, in 2018, they were vindicated. Two economists reanalyzed the basketball stats, and realized that the initial study had itself contained a miscalculation. In the original study, the psychologists had expected that if a player’s track record of making a basket after another basket looked the same as his scoring overall, it would be evidence that the hot-hand effect is mere illusion. They didn’t seem to realize that if the streaks were random, then the first value (chances of making a basket after other baskets) would have been lower than the second value (the chance of making a basket after any sort of shot), which meant the similarities they’d seen in those two data points was in fact evidence that the hot-hand effect was real. Thus, the “hot-hand fallacy” became known as “the hot-hand fallacy fallacy,” a debunking debunked.
But even if the hot-hand effect is real, does it truly count as luck? Or is it simply a mix of skill and psychology, the confidence that comes with being on a roll, the way our narratives can shift our behavior and change our world? The framing definitely had an effect, too. In 1989 two puckish statisticians presented the results of a decade of collecting coincidences. Their notebooks bulged with unexpected intersections. A woman had won the lottery twice in a span of 180 days. Two spouses and their child all had birthdays on the 11th day of different months. The statisticians wrote down every eerie or surprising story they could find. But many of these convergences weren’t nearly as strange as they seemed. “The law of truly large numbers,” the professors called it. If there’s a one-in-a-million chance of winning a lottery and a million people enter, the fact that someone rakes it in isn’t surprising. What is surprising is when that person is you.
In other words, if luck lurks in calculations of chance, it all depends on whose perspective you’re inhabiting. Probabilities can say much, but they’re percentages, dispassionate as the weather. What most luck theorists can agree on is that it is predicated on us caring — not just in a general sort of way, but about the fate of something or someone. It could be a city or a sports team, a language or a bacterium, an earwig or a human being. Luck demands a protagonist.
Whittington and Davis knew that Operation Hungary was a crapshoot. The quest had a storybook quality: The housing market in Edinburgh was rough, but they found a fixer-upper in Hungary, where Davis’s forebears were from. It was several hours outside of Budapest in the middle of a magical forest, its hollows snuffling with badgers. They envisioned a farm-hostel. It was off the beaten path — but they’d tried the beaten path. “We didn’t have enough money or job security at the time to play it safe, so we had to take a long-shot gamble,” Whittington said.
It was a disaster from the start, as if the whole project were overshadowed by the curse of her volatile grandmother’s rings. Davis had gotten a small inheritance from her, which she’d put toward a van for the trip, but almost immediately the vehicle began to have undiagnosable problems, emitting a weird grinding sound if she turned left, shaking violently if she tried to go over 40 miles per hour. She took it to mechanics, but they couldn’t figure it out. The day they were meant to leave for Hungary, the thing wouldn’t start; had they been parked on the street, the automobile association’s jumpstart would’ve been free, but because it was in a driveway, the guy had no choice but to charge them 150 pounds.
The construction crew they hired trashed their house rather than fixing it. They found themselves sleeping on the floor in a strange demolition zone, toilet leaking, walls full of incomprehensible drill holes — a cross between a lean-to and a loofah. The pandemic arrived. Davis discovered she was pregnant. They needed to leave the country before borders began to close. They tried to sell the bewitched van as scrap but the local official who’d usually take a bribe to help with the paperwork had just gone to jail.
The philosopher Ronald Dworkin makes a distinction between two kinds of luck. “Option luck” encompasses the gambles we choose to take — throwing a whole week’s pay into the pot for a craps game, say — while “brute luck” finds us of its own accord, without us sitting down at the betting table. By that standard, you might see the Hungary debacle as predictable, a choice they made knowing it might not work out. Sometimes, Whittington wasn’t even sure the trashed house involved luck at all. For contractors to charge more than their estimate is almost a universal law; for them to make a mess that you then might pay them to clean up is hardly unheard of. When he imagined the possible worlds close to our own, the likelihood of something going wrong with their rural Hungarian fixer-upper seemed pretty robust.
There were lucky moments, too, crazy things that worked against all odds. They drove across Europe, dodging the quicksand of COVID travel restrictions. They smuggled a favorite chicken into England in a lunchbox, hoping it wouldn’t cluck. And yet that didn’t always counterbalance the unease Davis felt, a nagging sense that things could have played out differently. Here they were, two millennial Ph.D.s in a pandemic, unemployed, their Hungarian farm-hostel dream foiled, living temporarily in Whittington’s mum’s house. A baby girl was born. They got married. They taught English in Spain. They decided to move to China, where the pay for such jobs was better. The company that was supposed to take them the three hours to the airport could only send a car that was too small for them and their luggage. The Chinese government wouldn’t issue their daughter a visa because the middle name on her birth certificate had been left off her British passport. The odd thing about luck is that it can encompass both the trivial and the existential — and an unbroken chain of the former can, in the moment, start to feel like the latter.
The moving around was exhausting. Sometimes they fought. If she was prone to mishaps, he could be frustratingly bad about making plans. In retrospect, he wishes he’d been more proactive at times, more helpful. Still they stuck together when a weaker marriage might’ve come apart. At times, though, the absurdity became too much. Davis remembered a moment when Whittington became almost angry about her luck. “He — seriously — was like, ‘I didn’t think I’d ever say this in my life, Holly, but I think you need a witch doctor or some sort of alternative religious practitioner. To uncurse you or something,’” she recalled. “He was like, ‘I don’t understand how this keeps happening, but this has got to stop.’”
She was taken aback. Her atheist husband, who’d written a dissertation about luck in the nerdiest, most jargon-filled, secular sort of way — luck presented almost as symbolic logic — was telling her she needed to get some kind of occult help? “He was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve gotta rewrite the whole thing now.’”
In order to test their definitions, philosophers often dream up thought experiments, purified world-in-a-jar stories, unmarred by the possible complexities of real life. In “What Luck is Not,” the 2008 paper that sent Whittington down this rabbit hole, Jennifer Lackey of Northwestern University asks us to consider Ramona, a demolition worker. Ramona is about to blow up an old warehouse but doesn’t know that a mouse has chewed through the wires connecting button to fuse. Right at the last second, though, a co-worker happens to hang his jacket in that precise spot, the metal hanger conducting the electricity that otherwise would’ve been cut off. Kaboom.
Lackey uses this story to argue that a lack of control isn’t necessary for an event to be lucky; Ramona’s, after all, was still the finger on the detonator. But for the lay reader, more telling than the question of Ramona’s agency is Lackey’s description of her own microfiction. It is “clearly riddled with luck.” One test of what luck actually means, she implies — which she keeps using to kick the tires of other scholars’ definitions — is our gut. Like the famous Supreme Court justice’s definition of porn, we recognize it when we see it.
But look closely at Lackey’s thought experiment and you might wonder whether the presence of luck depends on how she’s told this story. After all, what makes Ramona lucky in our eyes but not her own is how much we know: about the mouse, about the co-worker, about the hanger. Cut a detail, add a detail, and watch the luck start flickering in and out. Luck lies deep in our narrative-loving, pattern-seeking brains, in our ability to shift the variables around, to pull a Rashomon and tell the story a different way. It’s precisely this narrative alchemy that helped convince Steven Hales, a philosophy professor at the Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania, that luck is a myth. “The Guinness World Record holder for being struck by lightning? It turns out it’s a park ranger, and the guy’s been hit by lightning seven times,” he said. “So is he a super-unlucky man or is he very lucky to have survived seven lightning strikes?”
But our hunch that there was some kind of luck at play — good, bad, or both — is hard to shake. Luck emerges from a sense of contingency, an awareness of the myriad possible worlds that lurk close to our own. We invoke it when we hear our inner chorus of what-ifs, glimpse the infinite maze of paths all forking and crisscrossing. After Sauder published an article called “A Sociology of Luck” in 2020, exhorting his fellow social scientists to stop ignoring the concept, scholars responded, their studies full of such close calls. One looked at the role of chance encounters in working-class Britons’ careers. Another looked at how people saw luck in surviving a car accident or breast cancer. There’s a certain randomness to where we end up, which scholars like Sauder and Frank hope can function as an empathy machine. If someone else’s life can take a turn toward destitution through no fault of their own, yours could too.
That precarity is real, though you might quibble over whether to call it luck — and might not be consistent in your quibbling. Even children, when asked about why a certain stuffed animal works as a lucky charm, sometimes give a rational, adult-sounding answer: It gives them confidence, they’ve told Jacqueline Woolley, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin who studies children’s views about luck. There’s a kind of half-belief there, a version of Pascal’s wager. They aren’t fully committed to the supernatural, but they haven’t totally given up on it either. They’re acknowledging a mixture of powerlessness and control.
Even those who’ve spent years trying to pin luck down can do that same cognitive dance, moving between the magical and the logical. Whittington didn’t believe in the curse, and yet it kept popping into his possible-worlds-filled mind. Becoming a father in 2021 added another twist. He and Davis named their daughter Lilith. She’s 4 now and a minor terror in the way that toddlers often are, screaming for spaghetti, throwing rice in little sticky fistfuls, pulling the cat’s tail even after her parents tell her not to and maybe precisely because her parents tell her not to. She’s also one of the best things that’s ever happened to him. “I cannot imagine a world without Lilith,” he said.
He knows he sounds like a teenage boy high on Nietzsche. But wasn’t his daughter potentially the product of events he’d previously seen as unlucky?
If his dad hadn’t died, he wouldn’t have left philosophy. If he hadn’t left philosophy, he might not have been making that internal pact about whether or not he’d stay in Edinburgh. If he hadn’t made that internal pact, he wouldn’t have matched with Davis. If he hadn’t been there to match with Davis, that sperm wouldn’t have met that egg. And on and on and on. Would Lilith be the perfect, idiosyncratic Lilith that she is if she hadn’t been conceived in a deconstructed house in rural Hungary? Would Lilith be Lilith if she hadn’t first gone to day care in Spain and then in China?
He knows that someone might see danger in this kind of thinking; it could lead to an unseemly valorization of suffering. “I’m not going to say I should be grateful my father died when he did, because that was obviously horrible,” he said.
But he couldn’t really keep thinking of himself and Davis as unlucky, either. You might say he’d inadvertently taken the psychologist Richard Wiseman’s advice, transmuting bad luck into good. Davis, too, felt the shift. She had left all responsibility of online forms and travel plans to Whittington. She had locked her grandma’s rings away in a box. She didn’t look at it, didn’t touch it. Maybe that broke the curse. Or maybe that just liberated her from the past, from seeing the volatility of her grandmother on her own finger and in her own life.
Settling in one place helped. So did her latest blast of therapy. She’d had a breakdown after weaning Lilith and had gotten in touch with someone she’d known back in Scotland — through “feminist neo-pagan gathering things” — and those online sessions helped. “We had had such a tumultuous and difficult couple years there we got kind of trapped in a lot of the stories we were telling ourselves,” she said. The universe no longer seemed quite so malevolent. It started to seem like things were just happening rather than happening to them.
Things began going unexpectedly right. When she went in for IVF, in the hope of having a second child, doctors kept saying the odds were stacked against her. She was 40, of “advanced maternal age.” She had a history of uterine fibroids. She had an autoimmune disease. Her ovarian reserves were low. Her body didn’t respond to the hormones that were supposed to stimulate a kind of superovulation. Other patients in the clinic came out of their retrievals muttering worriedly about “only” getting eight eggs. Davis only got one.
Yet, against all odds, it worked. “We finally got some luck,” she said. That didn’t mean they didn’t half-belive in the curse. They still planned to go see the Zodiac specialist a friend of theirs recommended to help choose the most auspicious date for the C-section.
Even if Whittington wanted to know what in their lives was luck, that was something all his research on the subject couldn’t necessarily tell him. Luck, in his work, is often “epistemically closed off” — philosophy-speak for a black box. You can theorize about how razor close our world is to one with a radically different outcome, you can dream up examples to test your definitions, but when it comes to real life, those forking paths lie mostly beyond our perception. You can’t be sure whether you’ve been lucky or not, because, he said, in many cases, “We often don’t know how the universe would or could have been arranged.” We wonder how our lives might’ve been different, we arm ourselves with amulets and psychological tricks, we get rid of our grandmother’s cursed rings, but we can never be sure. We can’t access the bullets that whiz by us unseen.
