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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 229 (Jan 25, 2026) — The Luck Issue
The Sloww Sunday newsletter sends to 10,000+ readers slowing down to the wisdom within. If you enjoy this issue, please help grow Sloww by forwarding this newsletter to others.
New to Sloww? Here’s what it’s about in a nutshell (which mirrors the newsletter sections below):
👶 The Luck of Birth
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, then you know I’m a big fan of the ‘birth lottery’ (Summary | 🔒Premium)—which is sometimes even referred to as the ‘lucky sperm/egg club’—so we’ll start there:
- “I won the ‘Ovarian Lottery‘ … No great credit to me. I just was lucky at birth … I shouldn’t delude myself into thinking I’m some superior individual because of that … Through dumb luck, I drew a ridiculously long straw at birth … But Lady Luck is fickle and – no other term fits – wildly unfair.” — Warren Buffett
- “You didn’t choose your parents. You didn’t choose the society into which you were born. There is not a cell in your body or brain that you—the conscious subject—created. Nor is there a single influence coming from the outside world that you brought into being. And yet everything you think and do arises from this ocean of prior causes. So what you do with your luck, and the very tools with which you do it, including the level of effort and discipline you manage to summon in each moment, is more in the way of luck.” — Sam Harris
- “Accidents of birth might affect the trajectories of our lives far more comprehensively than we realise, dictating not only the socioeconomic position into which we’re born, but also our personalities and experiences as a whole: our talents and our weaknesses, our capacity for joy, and our ability to overcome tendencies toward violence, laziness or despair, and the paths we end up travelling. There is a deep sense of human fellowship in this picture of reality – in the idea that, in our utter exposure to forces beyond our control, we might all be in the same boat, clinging on for our lives, adrift on the storm-tossed ocean of luck.” — Oliver Burkeman
0️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
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🐎 A Parable of Luck
A classic story that shows you can never really judge luck as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ since everything is interconnected:
- “Good fortune has its roots in disaster, and disaster lurks with good fortune.” — Lao Tzu
- “You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” — Cormac McCarthy
1️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
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🧬 The Luck of Biology
Here we’ll focus on the work of Robert Sapolsky (Summary | 🔒Premium):
- “All that came before, with its varying flavors of uncontrollable luck, is what came to constitute you. This is how you became you.”
- “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.”
- “Every bad person is nothing, more or less, than the outcome of their biological luck and their luck has been worse than any person out there who was nothing, more or less, than the sum of their biological good luck which causes us to call them a ‘good person’ or a ‘smart person’ or an ’empathic person’ or a ‘talented person.'”
When asked to describe his own life, Sapolsky says:
- “Just damn luck. Every bit of neurosis, every bit of affective instability, every childhood trauma I’ve got tucked away—I’ve titrated in just the right way that I’ve turned it into more productivity. Incredibly lucky in that regard. My capacity to sublimate emotion into intellectual pursuit into really, really, really wanting to understand something … I’ve just been very lucky in that regard. I’ve gotten just the right levels of all sorts of tumult that have synergized most productively. In other words, just huge amounts of luck.”
2️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
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🧠 The Philosophy of Luck
Highlights from philosopher Galen Strawson (Luck Swallows Everything):
- “In the end, luck swallows everything … No one can be ultimately deserving of praise or blame for anything. It’s not possible. This is very, very hard to swallow, but that’s how it is. Ultimately, it all comes down to luck: luck—good or bad—in being born the way we are, luck—good or bad—in what then happens to shape us. We can’t be ultimately responsible for how we are in such a way as to have absolutely, buck-stopping responsibility for what we do.”
- “Suppose you are someone who struggles to be morally responsible, and make an enormous effort. Well, that too is a matter of luck. You’re lucky to be someone who has a character of a sort that disposes you to be able to make that sort of effort. Someone who lacks a character of that sort is merely unlucky … People sometimes think that one can take credit for effort even if one can’t take credit for natural talent, but in the end being the kind of person who’s got determination and who perseveres and makes an effort–that too is a gift, a piece of luck.”
- “The claim is not that people can’t change the way they are. They can, in certain respects (which tend to be exaggerated by North Americans and underestimated, perhaps, by members of other cultures). The claim is only that people can’t be supposed to change themselves in such a way as to be or become ultimately responsible for the way they are, and hence for their actions. One can put the point by saying that in the final analysis the way you are is, in every last detail, a matter of luck—good or bad.”
More Luck: Check out Thomas Nagel (Moral Luck) and Neil Levy (Hard Luck)
Meta-Luck: I recently realized that even how you view luck is a matter of luck!
Thought Experiment: I created my own thought experiment to showcase the extreme role of bad luck in life: The Life of Luckia: A Thought Experiment on the Birth Lottery, Moral Responsibility, & Free Will
3️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
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☯️ Beyond Luck
Advaita Vedanta and other spiritual traditions ultimately point to transcending mental concepts such as luck:
- “The ultimate reality is free. Our real nature is freedom … The director of the movie is free. In the movie, no character has freedom, but you are the director luckily. You are free, and this whole thing is your expression.” — Swami Sarvapriyananda
4️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
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A few final words on luck:
- “If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.” — John Irving
- “If I could, I’d write a huge encyclopedia just about the words luck and coincidence. It’s with those words that the universal language is written.” — Paulo Coelho
- “The path to freedom is paved with understanding, not ignorance. In this instance, understanding that the way we are is ultimately down to luck. To transcend notions of blame and responsibility is to foster empathy and compassion. When you realize that had you lived someone else’s life you’d be doing exactly what they’re doing, a profound equality emerges—one that prevents us from putting ourselves in any deep sense above or below anyone else. This kind of empathy can be a revolutionary force for good. I’m talking about unbounded empathy which flies high above the borders we impose in the world—which transcends the attributes of race, gender, religion, class, and nationality—and when multiplied across society is a powerful liberating force which in this time of turmoil and crisis is our best chance of turning conflict into peace, division into unity, and hate into compassion.” — Raoul Martinez
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
