Imagine this thought experiment: you flip a coin to decide what kind of life you’re gonna live.
And whatever result you had, that’s the life you have now.
That’s what you ended up with.
But isn’t it interesting how your whole perspective on how you feel about your life depends on what you imagine the other side of the coin would have been.
Do you feel lucky to have the life that you have? Or do you feel cursed, unlucky, to have the life that you have? So imagine if you have this coin flip, and on one side is your life, and on the other side is living in some kind of, you know, dream mansion, with the love of your life, and you know, all your favourite people, and you can spend every day in the company of those you love, and you can just enjoy life in this beautiful environment with no worries, blah blah blah.
All this kind of dream perfect scenario: that was the other side of the coin.
And then the other side of the coin is your life as you have it now.
Well, if I knew that, every day I woke up and I thought, well, “Ah, I could have had that other life.
I could have had this paradise life.
But instead, because I’m so unlucky and I got the other side of the coin, I ended up with this highly flawed life.” If every day I thought that, you know, “I could have had it so much better”, then it’s kind of hard to accept my life as it is now.
I just- I don’t want to be here, because I really should be there.
I should be in this better place.
But then on the other hand, you can imagine yourself in exactly the same life, and yet the other side of the coin is that you would be held in solitary confinement, except for occasional torture sessions, in a horrible prison, and that’s the other side of the coin, and the other side is your life as you have it now.
So you got this coin flip, and you could have ended up in a nightmare prison, but instead you got this life.
So now, if I woke up every day thinking that wow, I had survived this coin flip.
“How lucky am I? I’m amazingly lucky to have the life that I have.” And you know, it could have been so much worse.
So that no matter how bad my day might be, and how much there are so many inconveniences I have to deal with, wow, what I have, I’m just so lucky to have a chance to have what I have instead of what I could have had.
So I find this thought experiment amazing because I can have exactly the same life, exactly the same situation, everything exactly the same, but simply by imagining what it could have been, imagining that I somehow “missed a chance” or “dodged the chance” of some other kind of life, that that really significantly changes how I view my life.
But why should it? Because it’s only this life that is actually real.
The others are just simply imaginary lives.
But it seems like if we imagine that we could have and maybe should have had some kind of much better life, then everything about the way things are now just seems unfair.
It seems bad.
You know, I’m missing out on my chance.
Life sucks.
But if I imagine that I could have and maybe should have had this kind of horrible nightmare life, and instead I got this life, now it seems like wow, I’m just so lucky and I’m so happy simply to have this life that I have.
So how lucky do you feel? Do you feel like you’re missing out or you have missed out on something better, that every day is reminding you that you’re not having what you want? Or do you feel like you’ve missed out and you’re avoiding something that could have been much worse, which means that your life now is just wonderfully lucky? So maybe that is the question: how lucky do you feel?
#thoughtexperiment #luckylife #coinflip