The School of Life Dictionary by The School Of Life

Author:The School Of Life [Life, The School Of]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780995753594
Google: BoR5tAEACAAJ
Amazon: B0774TN78H
Barnesnoble: B0774TN78H
Publisher: The School of Life
Published: 2017-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

¶ Lottery of Life

In the modern world, many countries have lotteries in which millions of people participate every week in the hope of suddenly acquiring a substantial fortune. A striking thing is that it’s often quite disadvantaged and uneducated people who are most enthusiastic about lotteries. We might smile at their folly in getting statistics quite so wrong; if they had the wisdom and mathematical intelligence to understand how slim their chances were, they’d surely never bother. The chances of winning the largest payout is around one in fourteen million. We naturally feel a bit sorry for people investing in such slender hopes; they are taking aim at an impossibly small target.

But we’re probably no better. We may not have a sense that we’re playing any kind of lottery, and yet we are: the Lottery of Life. We too are clutching tickets of various kinds and setting our sights on statistical near-miracles – even while we think we’re being utterly sober, rational and level-headed. The crucial place where this lottery-like behaviour happens is in relation to our hopes of happiness in two areas in particular: love and work.

If we were forced to spell out a picture of an ideally successful life, it might go something like this. We early on pick just the right area of work to apply ourselves to, swerve neatly into new fields at the ideal moment, and receive public recognition, money and honour for our efforts. Work is fun, creative and utterly in line with our talents.

There are similar satisfactions to be had around love. After a spate of compelling and passionate relationships, we meet one very special, beautiful, kind and devoted person who understands us completely – often without us needing to communicate with words. Sex is extraordinary and children and domesticity never grind us down. We enjoy perfect health and retire with the feeling of having accomplished what we set out to do. We experience a dignified, respected old age, admired by our descendants and occasionally exercising a deft guiding touch behind the scenes as an éminence grise. We die gently in our late nineties of a non-painful illness in a tranquil, flower-filled room, having written a wise and generous will.

Such scenarios occur about as often as a payout on the lottery. But (to our surprise, despite our education and apparently realistic and practical natures), we may have strongly invested in some modified version of just this form of phantasm. We don’t grasp just how rare and strange ninety years on earth without calamities in love and work might actually be.

If we could see what love and work were really like for most other people, we’d be much less sad about our own situation and attainments. If we could fly across the world and peer into everyone’s lives and minds like an all-seeing angel, we’d perceive how very frequent disappointment is, how much unfulfilled ambition is circulating, how much confusion and uncertainty is played out in private, and how many breakdowns and intemperate arguments unfold with every new day.

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