The Good Luck of Your Bad Luck: Marcus Aurelius on the Stoic Strategy for Weathering Life’s Waves and Turning Suffering into Strength

"In the end, luck swallows everything ... 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." — Galen Strawson

" The way you are is, in every last detail, a matter of luck —good or bad ... In the end, luck swallows everything : this is one way of conveying the fundamental respect in which there can be no ultimate responsibility." — Galen Strawson

It’s a reminder that for everything outside of our control, we retain—at the core of our being—an incredible power: The power to choose what we do with what happens to us. The power to decide what role an event will play in our lives. The power to write the end of our own story.

No one can take that away from us. People can hurt us. Money can be los... See more

Author Cormac McCarthy on the benefits of bad luck:

"You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from."

Source: No Country for Old Men

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In the end, we cannot control our luck—good or bad—but we can control our effort and preparation. Luck smiles on us all from time to time. And when it does, the way to honor your good fortune is to work hard and make the most of it.

I suspect this kind of stoicism — for Marcus and Wallace and some modern popularizers — is a response to perceiving the breakdown of a functioning world. Their prescription for dealing with such troubles is to develop profound internal strength, and in doing so the stoic attitude can dodge some societal-level failures by compartmentalizing toward a... See more

Luck and risk are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort. They are so similar that you can’t believe in one without equally respecting the other. They both happen because the world is too complex to allow 100% of your actions to dictate 100% of your outcomes. They are driven by the same thing: Y

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