Many years ago I had a picture above my bathroom mirror in Oslo that read "Everything in life boils down to luck."
I looked at it every day. Guests rarely wanted to discuss it; people are not usually in the mood to debate free will when they have come over for drinks.
You did not pick your genes. You did not pick your parents, your country, the year you were born, the worldview you grew up in, the people who walked into your life, or the mood your mother was in the day you were conceived. Everything you call yourself was built from material you did not choose.
What you did, you did with a brain that was given to you, in a body that was given to you, raised by people who themselves were the product of things they did not choose. Trace any choice back far enough and you stop finding choices; you find dominoes.
Free will does not feel like a question; it feels obvious. Right now, I could stop typing. I could pick up the cup, or leave it. Whatever I decide will feel like me deciding. And that feeling does not go away just because the logic says it should. Most friends I discuss this with do not refute the luck argument. They agree with it, then act as if it does not apply, because the feeling of choosing is too strong to ignore (and I do the same).
The philosophers have not settled this either. Maybe free will survives somewhere inside all this. If so, I do not understand where. But it might be there, and the feeling of choosing might not be an illusion. Even if choosing is real, almost everything around the choosing is luck. Whether that leaves anything that deserves to be called free is the part I cannot resolve.
The argument is hard to live with because two things come apart if you take it seriously. The first thing is that I earned what I have. The second is that other people earned what they have, including the ones who have less.
Consider yourself, and the things that are working in your life. The things you would put on a list if asked what is going right. Most of those things involved you doing something. But the doing was done by someone with the brain you were given, raised by the people you were raised by, in the country you were raised in. You did the work. The conditions were not earned. And yet most of us, when we look at what we have, credit ourselves for it, even if we do not say so out loud.
The clearest example for me is discipline. I think of myself as a disciplined person. I tend to do what I say I'll do, I work when I plan to work, I do not let things slide. I am a little proud of it, and a little judgmental of people who do not have the same discipline.
But discipline is an obvious thing the luck argument should undermine. I did not pick the brain that finds routines satisfying. I did not pick the parents who made discipline and planning normal. I did not pick the temperament that does not always give in to short-term temptation over long-term good.
Some people wake up with energy. Some wake up with anxiety. Some with focus. Some with depression. Not everyone starts with the same machinery. And yet part of me still thinks the discipline is mine, and that the next person could have managed if they had only tried harder. That part is wrong. But it is still there.
And then there is the opposite way: When I see a parent at the supermarket loading the trolley with sweets and sugary drinks for their child, there is a small feeling I do not like. Almost annoyance. The luck argument is what catches that feeling. The parent may have been raised on the same food. Their parents may have been too. Years before, a marketing budget did decades of work on a family that did not know it was a target.
The same is true everywhere if you look. The loud person at the next café table. The co-worker who keeps doing less than the rest of the team. The guy who talks big but never gets anywhere in real life. Mucho ruido, pocas nueces. The man asking for change at the same street I walk every day. Too often there is a small private verdict: they could try harder, they should know better. In each case, the verdict assumes someone underneath who could have done otherwise. If the logic holds, that someone was built the same way I was.
The argument cuts in both directions and one direction is easier to take than the other. People can be told that the poor are not lazy, or that the obese are not weak, and they will nod. Tell them that they themselves did not really earn their job, their fitness, their stable marriage, the way their mind works, and the room cools. We are willing to extend luck to others as a gift. We are not willing to receive it as a verdict on ourselves. We do not just want to have earned our lives. We also want to have written them.
A friend pushed back on this with karma. Maybe the lucky ones earned their conditions across earlier lives, and what looks like a lottery is really a long bill being paid. I find the idea interesting, but it sounds like moving the dominoes further back; whoever you were in life one had to start somewhere.
If credit is mostly an illusion, then so is blame. Then what is punishment for? If somebody who commits a crime did so with a brain that was assembled by causes they did not choose, what exactly are we asking the prison to do? Protect us from them, yes. Deter the next person, yes. Punish them in the deep moral sense, for choosing wrongly? That gets harder. And if I did not really earn my comfortable life, then the gap between me and someone who has less starts to look less like fairness and more like a lottery. Which makes tax and redistribution feel different too. Less like charity, more like fairness.
I still catch myself crediting my own discipline when I should not. I still catch the small private verdict when I look at the parent in the supermarket queue. The picture was above my bathroom mirror for years and it has changed my life less than I would have predicted.
But not by nothing. Once you have sat with the argument for long enough, certain feelings start to lose their sharp edge. Judgment becomes less automatic. The room for empathy gets a little wider. Not because empathy is a duty, but because the argument leaves less room for anything else.
Who would you treat differently if you accepted that everything boils down to luck?