Toast always lands butter side down. It always rains on bank holidays. You never win the lottery, but other people you know seem to ... Do you ever get the impression that you were born unlucky? Even the most rational person can be convinced at times that there is a force out there making mishaps occur at the worst possible time. We all like to believe that Murphy's Law is true。
Part of the explanation for bad luck is mathematical, but part is psychological. Indeed there is a very close connection between people's perception of bad luck and interesting coincidences.
For example, take the belief that “bad things always happen in threes”This popular notion would be unlikely to stand the scrutiny of any scientific study, but it must have some basis in experience, otherwise the phrase would never have arisen in So while the probability of being made redundant on any particular day and the probability of being sick may both be small, the chance of both occurring is almost certainly higher than the product of the two probabilities.
So much for the general incidents of bad luck which crop up in life. Let’s get on to a specific one that everyone has encountered.
You are off to visit a friend who lives at the other end of the city. You look up the road in the street atlas, and discover that it is right on the edge of the page. This means that finding the precise route becomes a chore of flicking backwards and forwards from one page to the next. Either the road is half on one page and half on the other, or it's spread across the fold in the middle of the book. And if it’s an ordnance survey map, then your destination is at just the point where you folded the the first place. What might be the rational explanation?
Some things are only marginally bad, for example the train arriving five minutes late. Some are extremely bad, such as failing an exam or being sacked. So badness is much better represented as being on a spectrum rather than something which is there or not there.
A particular event may only be a misfortune because of the circumstances around it. The train arriving five minutes late is a neutral event if you are in no hurry and reading an interesting newspaper article while you wait. It is bad if you are late for an important meeting.
When it comes to bad things happening in threes, what may be most important of all is the duration and memorability of the first event. Take a burst pipe while you are away on holiday, for example. It may take less than an hour to flood the house, but this one bad event can remain alive and kicking for many months, with the cleaning up operation and the debate with your insurers acting as constant reminders of the original event.
The longer the first bad event sticks in the front of your mind, the moreopportunities you will have to experience two more bad events. A month latersomeone bumps the back of your car and a week after that you lose your wedding ring. The mind which is already on a low from the first event will quickly leap to connect the subsequent misfortunes as part of the series.
It wouldn't matter that there could be a two-month timescale over which everything happened. By the time you have recovered from the water damage you are actively looking out for the next disaster. The timescale has been extended as long as is necessary to confirm the original prophecy.
As with coincidences, in bad luck there is a tendency to look for the examples which confirm the theory, and ignore those which don’t (because they are less interesting). Single bad events happen all the time. That alone should be enough to disprove the theory. Bad things also come in twos. But it is more likely that a friend will tell you “three bad things have happened to me, isn’t that typical” than “only two bad things have happened to me, which just proves that the theory doesn’t work”. After all, the latter is tempting fate!
There is, however, at least one rational reason why bad events might cluster together. It is related to probability and independence. Unlucky events are not always independent of each other. Anybody who is made redundant is bound to suffer some depression. That will lower the body’s defences, making the person vulnerable to illness, and also making them less alert and responsive (so they may be more likely to drop a precious vase, for example).
map over.
It doesn’t seem fair. After all a map only has a tiny bit of “edge” but plenty of “middle” in which your destination could be situated. Or has it? In fact the chance of picking a destination which is close to the edge of the map is a lot higher than you might expect.
That represents 28 per cent of the area of the whole page of the map, which means that any specific point that you are seeking on this map has a 28 per cent chance (that's nearly one in three) of being in an awkward position within 1 cm of the edge of the page. And if you regard being within 2 cm of the edge of the page as being awkward, the chance of ill-fortune climbs to 52 per cent. In other words, you might expect this misfortune to occur on almost every other journey.
As in most bad luck stories, you forget about the number of times the road doesn’t land awkwardly and remember the times it does, and in this case the chance of a bad result is so high that before long you are bound to be cursing your misfortune, or the map’s printer, or both. This, incidentally, is why many modern road maps allow significant overlaps between adjacent map pages. In a good road atlas, at least 30 per cent of the page is duplicated elsewhere.
One of the best examples of selective memory where an unfair comparison is made between good and bad is in the relative frequency of red and green lights on a journey. For once, the perception of “I always seem to get red lights when I’m in a hurry” is true and verifiable.
To simplify the situation, think of a traffic light as being like tossing a coin, with a 50 per cent chance of being red, and 50 per cent of being green. (In fact most traffic lights spend more time on red). If you encounter six traffic lights on a journey, then you are no more likely to escape a red light than you are to toss six consecutive heads, the chance of which is 1 in 64.
Red lights come up just as often when the driver is not in a hurry; it’s just that the disadvantage of the red light is considerably less if time is not critical. The false part of the perception is that red lights happen more than green lights.
The reason for this is simply that a driver has more time to think about a red light than a green light, because while the latter is gone in seconds – and indeed is an experience no different from just driving along the open road – the red light forces a change of behaviour, a moment of exertion and stress, and then a deprivation of freedom for a minute or so. Red lights stick in the mind, while green lights are instantly forgotten.
The year the war began I was in the fifth grade at the Annie F. Warren Grammar School in Winthrop, and that was the winter I won the prize for drawing the best Civil Defense signs. That was also the winter of Paula Brown's new snowsuit, and even now, 13 years later, I can recall the changing colors of those days, clear and definite as a pattern seen through a kaleidoscope.
I lived on the bay side of town, on Johnson Avenue, opposite the Logan Airport, and before I went to bed each night, I used to kneel by the west window of my room and look over the lights of Boston that blazed and blinked far off across the darkening water. The sunset flaunted its pink flag above the airport, and the sound of waves was lost in the perpetual droning of the planes. I marveled at the moving beacons Before supper every night, we listened to Superman together on the radio, and during the day we made up our own adventures on the way to school.
The Annie F. Warren Grammar School was a red-brick building, set back from the main highway on a black tar street, surrounded by barren gravel playgrounds. Out by the parking lot David and I found the perfect alcove for our Superman dramas. The dingy back entrance to the school was deep-set in a long passageway which was an excellent place for surprise captures and sudden rescues.
During recess, David and I came into our own. We ignored the boys playing baseball on the gravel court and the girls giggling at dodge-ball in the dell. Our Superman games made us outlaws, yet gave us a sense of windy superiority. We even on the runway and watched, until it grew completely dark, the flashing red and green lights that rose and set in the sky like shooting stars. The airport was my Mecca, my Jerusalem. All night I dreamed of flying.
Those were the days of my technicolor dreams. Mother believed that I should have an enormous amount of sleep, and so I was never really tired when I went to bed. This was the best time of the day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go. My flying dreams were believable as a landscape by Dali, so real that I would awake with a sudden shock, a breathless sense of having tumbled like Icarus from the sky and caught myself on the soft bed just in time. These nightly adventures in space began when Superman started invading my dreams and teaching me how to fly. He used to come roaring by in his shining blue suit with his cape whistling in the wind, looking remarkably like my Uncle Frank who was living with mother and me. In the magic whirling of his cape I could hear the wings of a hundred seagulls, the motors of a thousand planes.
I was not the only worshipper of Superman in our block. David Stirling, a pale, bookish boy who lived down the street, shared my love for the sheer poetry of flight.
found a stand-in for a villain in Sheldon Fein, the sallow mamma's boy on our block who was left out of the boys' games because he cried whenever anybody tagged him and always managed to fall down and skin his fat knees.
At first, we had to prompt Sheldon in his part, but after a while he became an expert on inventing tortures and even carried them out in private, beyond the game. He used to pull the wings from flies and the legs off grasshoppers, and keep the broken insects captive in a jar hidden under his bed where he could take them out in secret and watch them struggling. David and I never played with Sheldon except at recess. After school we left him to his mamma and his bonbons and his helpless insects.
At the time my Uncle Frank was living with us while waiting to be drafted, and I was sure that he bore an extraordinary resemblance to Superman incognito. David couldn't see the likeness as clearly as I did, but he admitted that Uncle Frank was the strongest man he had ever known, and could do lots of tricks like making caramels disappear under napkins and walking on his hands.
In the fall of our final year, our mood changed. the relaxed atmosphere of the preceding summer semester, the impromptu ball games, the boating on the Charles River, the late-night parties had disappeared, and we all started to get our heads down, studying late, and attendance at classes rose steeply again. We all sensed we were coming to the end of our stay here, that we would never get a chance like this again, and we became determined not to waste it. Most important of course were the final exams in April and May in the following year. No one wanted the humiliation of finishing last in He thought for a moment. Then he said, \tomorrow morning, just you and me. Maybe we can catch some crabs for dinner, and we can talk more.\
It was a small motor boat, moored ten minutes away, and my father had owned it for years. Early next morning we set off along the estuary. We didn't talk much, but enjoyed the sound of the seagulls and the sight of the estuary coastline and the sea beyond.
There was no surf on the coastal waters at that time of day, so it was a smooth half-hour ride until my father switched off the motor. \class, so the peer group pressure to work hard was strong. Libraries which were once empty after five o'clock in the afternoon were standing room only until the early hours of the morning, and guys wore the bags under their eyes and their pale, sleepy faces with pride, like medals proving their diligence.
But there was something else. At the back of everyone's mind was what we would do next, when we left university in a few months' time. It wasn't always the high flyers with the top grades who knew what they were going to do. Quite often it was the quieter, less impressive students who had the next stages of their life mapped out. One had landed a job in his brother's advertising firm in Madison Avenue, another had got a script under provisional acceptance in Hollywood.The most ambitious student among us was going to work as a party activist at a local level. We all saw him ending up in the Senate or in Congress one day. But most people were either looking to continue their studies, or to make a living with a white-collar job in a bank, local government, or anything which would pay them enough to have a comfortable time in their early twenties, and then settle down with a family, a mortgage and some hope of promotion.
I went home at Thanksgiving, and inevitably, mybrothers and sisters kept asking me what I was planning to do. I didn't know what to say. Actually, I did know what to say, but I thought they'd probably criticize me, so I told them what everyone else was thinking of doing.
My father was a lawyer, and I had always assumed he wanted me to go to law school, and follow his path through life. So I hesitated.
This was not the answer I thought he would expect. Travel? Where? A writer? About what? I braced myself for some resistance to the idea.
\at the moment. You need to find out what you really enjoy now, because if you don't, you won't be successful later.\
said, picked up a rusty, mesh basket with a rope attached and threw it into the sea.
We waited a while, then my father stood up and said, \this,\
Crabs fascinated me. They were so easy to catch. It wasn't just that they crawled into such an obvious trap, through a small hole in the lid of the basket, but it seemed as if they couldn't be bothered to crawl out again even when you took the lid off. They just sat there, waving their claws at you.
The cage was brimming with dozens of soft shell crabs, piled high on top of each other. \
And we watched. The crab climbed up the mesh towards the lid, and sure enough, just as it reached the top, one of its fellow crabs reached out, clamped its claw onto any available leg, and pulled it back. Several times the crab tried to defy his fellow captives, without luck.
Not only did the crab give up its lengthy struggle to escape, but it actually began to help stop other crabs trying to escape. He'd finally chosen an easy way of
life.
Suddenly I understood why my father had suggested catching crabs that morning. He looked at me. \get pulled back by the others,\he said. \some time figuring out who you are and what you want in life. Look back at the classes you're taking, and think aboutwhich ones were most productive for you personally.Then think about what's really important to you, what really interests you, what skills you have. Try to figure out where you want to live, where you want to go, what you want to earn, how you want to work. And if you can't answer these questions now, then take some time to find out. Because if you don't, you'll never be happy.\
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