Interpretation of chance or explanation of the world, it is an alibi that we give ourselves to explain what happens to us. With more or less success, depending on the point of view we adopt.
Even when we don’t believe it, we believe it a little… When we sometimes hear people say: “I’m so lucky,” “That’s bad luck,” “With a little luck…”, we’re like those who read their horoscope while insisting that they don’t adhere to astrology. So what is this illusion that something foreign and superior governs our lives about? Three elements: our need to control or understand what happens to us; our relationship with others, depending on whether we are luckier or less lucky than them; our self-confidence and our ability to face the unexpected. Our recourse to the idea of luck allows us to explain chance, to interpret the unexpected, even the unhoped-for. Whether good or bad, luck is a magnificent alibi.
Between omnipotence and submission
Let’s go back to the etymology. In old French, luck (same root as “choir,” from cadere, “to fall” in Latin) meant the way the dice fell. By extension, it became a sign of an alea (“game of dice” in Latin) or of a happy chance (az-zahar means “dice” in Arabic). Luck, fortune and chance are therefore closely linked in our beliefs. They allow us to explain a world where everything, the worst as well as the best, can happen. They give meaning to what happens to us and reflect the idea that not everything is explainable, controllable, acceptable. At the same time, they evoke our omnipotence and our submission to an order external to us. Whether we consider ourselves lucky or unlucky, we reveal the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. It is one of the specificities of our species to invent myths in which we give meaning to what happens to us. Can you imagine a gazelle saying to her gazelle friend: “I was lucky today, I didn’t come across a lion”? Psychology explains to us that it is in our childhood that the internal representations of our life were created, the first beliefs, the first stories that were told to us, the first scenarios that we introjected. All this has little to do with reality, but what is reality? Some will consider themselves lucky, even though their life is strewn with trials. Others will lament their lack of luck even though their experiences have been more lenient. It all depends on the story we tell ourselves about how we experience what happens and our resilience in the face of difficulties.
This belief in luck belongs to those who have faith in miracles, those who sprinkle their lives with little bursts of light, the optimists of the glass half full. “There exists everywhere and always, unconsciously, a disposition to experience a miracle,” Carl Gustav Jung is said to have said in opposition to Sigmund Freud, who saw, in resorting to the idea of luck, only an illusion of control. It is narcissistically nice to say that we are lucky. As if our happiness in love, our fulfilling work or this dream trip meant that, somewhere, we are the chosen ones of something greater than ourselves. And then it seems modest. “What do you want, I was born under a lucky star”, so as not to overwhelm those who would have been born under darker stars. Another story that we tell ourselves. Because the truth is that luck is above all an attitude, a disposition of the mind.
An analytical disposition: the lucky person will look at the world from the angle of what it contains in terms of possibilities; emotional: the lucky person feeds on the satisfaction he obtains in what he receives or undertakes; behavioral: the lucky person puts in place, in his interactions, a creativity that will influence events.