"Why is your existence so improbable? Well, it required the unbroken stretch of survival and reproduction of all your ancestors, reaching back 4 billion years to single-celled organisms. It required your parents meeting and reproducing to create your singular set of genes (the odds of that alone are 1 in 400 quadrillion).
1 in 10^2,685,000.
To contrast, the odds of you dying are 1 in 1.
Dying is nothing special – that reality is corroborated by math.
But your being alive is nearly impossible. That probability is the same as if you handed out 2 million dice, each die with one trillion sides… then rolled those 2 million dice and had them all land on 439,505,270,846.
Again, I can’t stress this enough, the odds of dying are 1 in 1. (Not even 1 in 2).
Dying is totally ordinary. It’s so ordinary it’s assured. Dying is the most natural, completely average thing you can do.
In contrast, being alive is so stupendously unlikely it’s almost impossible. It’s supranatural. The odds are so breathtakingly close to zero they almost are zero.
If that’s not a call to live with an exhilarating, exploding gratitude, I don’t know what is.
Live your life like the remarkable, incredible rareness that it is.
Do it because you are the lucky stardust of the universe that got to wake up and look around.
Lucky you.
Lucky me.
Lucky dust."
- Jacinta Bowler
There are other truths which are perceived very clearly by our intellect so long as we attend to the arguments on which our knowledge of them depends; and we are therefore incapable of doubting them during this time. But we may forget the arguments in question and later remember simply the conclusions which were deduced from them.
The question will now arise as to whether we possess the same firm and immutable conviction concerning these conclusions, when we simply recollect that they were previously deduced from quite evident principles.
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