What is luck and how does it work?
We humans have been fascinated by people who seem to have it all. They have a great job. They live in a nice house. The tornado that rips through town leaves that nice house standing when it has demolished every other one. And the people who live there? Well, mom has never been sick in her life, dad seems to turn everything he touches into gold, daughter Katie has a lot of friends, and son Bobby is the star of the football team. We would consider them to be a very lucky family. But what, really, is “good luck?” And how does good luck work when you are playing the lottery?
“Good luck” is defined by having good fortune, a positive and happy outcome, especially by chance. The Cambridge English dictionary defines luck as ‘the force that causes things, especially good things, to happen to you by chance and not as a result of your own efforts or abilities’. Many people believe that luck is something that you’re naturally born with and is driven by a higher power. That some people are simply lucky or unlucky. So good luck is going to the doctor and finding out that medical tests show that you are healthy. Good luck is driving your car down a street, barely missing being hit by another car, swerving around two light poles, and landing upside down on someone’s lawn without any injury to yourself. Good luck is winning the jackpot on the lottery.
Some people just seem to have good luck follow them around. Every item on sale is in stock at the grocery store. They are constantly winning a prize on the lottery. Why them? Why do people who win the big jackpots on the lottery seem to be the ones that have all the good luck?
Well, there are many reasons for this. One, does luck really exist at all? That depends on your own personal point of view. If you live in a shack and your neighbour lives i a mansion, are you more unlucky, or do they have more luck, than you? Maybe they use luck magick or lucky charms or items to attract luck to them. Maybe you just don’t have the right attitude, smarts, gumption, or drive to better yourself to create your own luck. Or maybe your soul was born into the wrong body to begin with.
Regardless of your stature in life or your view on “luck,” winning on the lottery is very random and very much against the odds for everyone playing it. Then why, you ask, do some people win the lottery multiple times? Isn’t that highly against the odds? It sure is, but it does happen. And really, the only thing that can explain it is “luck.”
So how does luck on winning at the lottery change the outcomes of wildly random events on each draw? Who knows. Some people win the lottery who don’t seem to have any luck at all. And other people who seem to have the proverbial horseshoe inside an orifice, never win on the lottery. And that is balancing factor of the perception of luck. Not every unlucky person fails to get lucky on occasion, and not every luck person gets lucky at some things.
Playing the lottery with lucky numbers, a troll doll on your key chain, coins buried on the four corners of your property, or a weirdly large number of rabbit’s foots hidden in every crevice of your home, does not guarantee you will win the jackpot. Nor does having to rely on the local food bank mean you can’t win the lottery jackpot.
You can have the best good luck in the world, but when it comes right down to winning the lottery, pure chance is the only thing that is going to really determine whether you win the jackpot or not.