Most people go through their entire lives without truly grasping this.
Not in a deep, felt way. Not in a way that actually changes how they show up every morning.
And I get it. It’s easy to be caught up in the daily grind, the complaints, the comparisons, the feeling that things aren’t where they should be.
But today I want to shake you a little. Because once you see this clearly, you can’t unsee it. And it changes everything.
The Odds of You Existing
Let’s start with the numbers, because they’re insane.
For the individual you to be alive, an incredible sequence of events had to happen perfectly:
Your parents meeting: ~1 in 20,000
Them having a child together: ~1 in 2,000
The exact sperm + egg combo that made you: ~1 in 400 quadrillion
If you put all that probability into a single coin flip, you’d need to flip heads ~2.6 million times in a row.
That’s how crazy it is that you exist.
And even if we set aside the big math, roughly 1 in 3 pregnancies never makes it to birth. Miscarriages, stillbirths, complications. The fact that you got to breathe for even one day already makes you extraordinarily lucky.
The Winning Streak That Made You
This one really gets me.
Every single one of your ancestors, going back 4 billion years, survived long enough to reproduce. Not one broke the chain. Through plagues, famines, wars, ice ages, predators - the chain held.
You are the result of an unbroken winning streak across all of life on Earth.
One bad winter. One wrong place at the wrong time. One plague that took out the wrong person. And you don’t exist.
We Are Alone in an Incomprehensibly Large Universe
Take a step back even further.
There are 2 trillion galaxies in the universe, each with hundreds of billions of stars, most with planets. And life as we know it - conscious, self-aware, meaning-seeking life - exists on exactly one of them. So far.
We are made of “space dust,” tiny atoms that somehow organized themselves into something capable of thinking about its own existence. That alone is mind-bending.
And out of 8.7 million species on Earth, you were born as a human being - the most evolved species that has ever lived on this planet. You could have been a fly with a 24-hour lifespan. A cow in a factory farm. A fish.
Instead, you got consciousness. Language. The ability to dream, create, and choose your life.
As far as we know, we are the only species in the entire known universe who can do that.
You Were Also Born at the Best Time in History
I know it doesn’t feel that way when you scroll social media or watch the news. But stay with me.
For 99% of human history, “a good day” meant not starving.
Until the industrial revolution, roughly 200 years ago, all of our focus, energy, and cognitive bandwidth served one single purpose: find food. There was no time to think about purpose, fulfillment, or legacy. Just survival. Hunter-gatherers spent their entire days searching for their next meal. When we settled, it was because we discovered agriculture. Growing food was a revolution.
For the vast majority of human history, food was the meaning of life.
And now? You can have food delivered to your door in 30 minutes. Your ancestors would have considered that magic.
Yet we’re still not satisfied. Still not present. Still not appreciating it.
(And let’s not forget, a lot of people on Earth today are still starving while we throw away mountains of food every single day.)
And You, Specifically, Won Even More Lotteries
If you’re reading this: you speak and read English, which gives you access to the vast majority of the world’s information and opportunities. You have internet. You have enough stability in your life to read a newsletter about personal growth.
You are in a very small percentage of all humans alive on Earth right now.
You have won more lotteries than you realize.
I Learned This the Hard Way
It took me 29 years to truly understand this. Until I tried to conceive, to create a new life.
Until then, I thought it was just as easy as ordering something on Amazon.
In 2016, we experienced our first miscarriage. In 2017, we found out our baby boy had a very rare and complicated genetic disorder - we made the decision to terminate the pregnancy. In 2019, another miscarriage. In 2020, a missed miscarriage.
We tried 4 times to bring a healthy human life into the world. It didn’t work out.
Because it’s not easy. I saw firsthand how hard life is to create. How fragile it is. How it can be taken before it even starts - even today, at the most advanced point in our civilization.
Those were multiple punches in the face. But they woke me up. I see it clearly now.
I understood, the hard and painful way, how lucky I was to simply be alive and healthy.
So What Are You Doing With It?
We finally have the freedom to actually live, and most people are sleepwalking through it.
You are spending this astronomically rare gift on a job you hate, constantly worrying about what other people think, never satisfied with what you have, and just waiting for “someday” to do anything about it.
You were given a golden opportunity. The universe went through an absurd amount of trouble to get you here.
Are you living like it?
It Doesn’t Have to Stay This Way
I woke up. The hard way - through loss, through grief, through being forced to confront how fragile and precious life actually is.
But you don’t have to wait for a tragedy to shake you awake.
You can decide today to approach your life differently. To stop postponing happiness. To stop living by other people’s scripts. To actually build the life you want, on your terms.
I see it happen constantly with the people I work with. It doesn’t matter your age, your situation, where you’re starting from. When there’s a will, there’s a way. And once you wake up to how precious this life is, you can never go back to sleepwalking through it.
If that resonates with you - if you feel the itch, the discomfort, the sense that there’s more available to you - I’d love to talk.
Life is too short and too rare to wait.
I love this. I can totally relate and I’ve always found it unfortunate that it so often takes something as profound as grief or loss to really see how incredibly special life is. And even then (for me at least), that clarity ebbs and flows. Your writing is such a beautiful reminder of how lucky we are.
Wow. Ending tonight feeling like a miracle wrapped in a miracle. I too “woke up” following loss and grief and it’s incredible the forces at play in life trying to lull me back to “sleep” and forget the fortune of this wild and precious life.