Every Day Is a Gift

It’s easy to be negative, cynical, and pessimistic. What’s incredibly admirable are those who manage to stay positive in difficult times. Everyone’s version of “difficult” is different, and what’s easy for some may be incredibly challenging for others.

I think one reason we might go down the path of negative thinking is that we forget to put things into perspective. At any moment, there are an infinite number of things that could go wrong, which could suddenly turn your delightful Sunday afternoon into a weekend disaster.

The Incredible Unlikelihood of Existing #

The odds of being born are incredibly slim. At the cosmic level, you need the perfect arrangement of particles at just the right moment to initiate life. And while biology has had billions of years to perfect itself, and it has created the most efficient machines ever devised, there are still so many things that can disrupt life at any moment.

Our entire existence is a miracle: Earth is an improbably perfect planet, orbiting just the right sized star, at just the right distance, with just enough of an atmosphere, and the perfect mix of elements in their ideal states.

Trying to quantify the likelihood of existing is pretty difficult. An exercise, perhaps, best left to the imagination. But, we can pull the thread a little and see where it goes.

If we start at conception, the likelihood that one particular sperm will fertilize an egg is staggeringly low. Of the approximately 300 million sperm typically released, only about 200 even reach the site of fertilization¹. That’s odds of roughly 1 in 1.5 million for any individual sperm to even get close to the egg. And that’s assuming everything went perfectly along the way—that the sperm manages to survive the acidic environment, navigate through selective cervical mucus, choose the correct fallopian tube, and arrive at precisely the right time.

And to be born: so much can go wrong from the point of fertilization on the way to birth. Often, things do go wrong. And while modern medicine has drastically reduced infant mortality, it’s still quite a feat to make it all the way from a zygote to an infant child.

In 1900, the United States experienced approximately 100 infant deaths per 1,000 live births—exactly 1 out of every 10 births². Some urban areas saw rates as high as 30%. Today, that number has plummeted to just 5.6 per 1,000, representing a greater than 90% reduction.

Let’s think about the cosmic scale. According to NASA and the University of Nottingham, there are approximately 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe³. Each galaxy contains an average of 100 million stars, though our Milky Way alone has between 100 and 400 billion⁴. With an average of 1.6 planets per star according to Kepler mission data⁵, we’re talking about numbers so vast they defy comprehension.

Even rough estimates reveal an unfathomably large number of stars in the universe, larger than the number of grains of sand on Earth.

So in order to be on Earth—the most hospitable place for our species—the odds are somewhere on the order of 1 in 2 trillion times 100 million times 1.6. What is the likelihood that you would just happen to be on the one grain that can support life (so far as we know)?

Reframing #

I’m hardly a beacon of light in anyone’s life. I feel that I’m the sort of person who is generally pessimistic and has a tendency to forget to be grateful for the things I should be grateful for on a daily basis.

I like this idea of trying to put everything into the context of the universe. Next time I stub my toe, I will try to stop myself and remember that it took billions of years of evolution to even be able to have a toe. I should be grateful that biology has created such a remarkable system for warning me that I’m at risk of injuring my foot: pain, a signal delivered by nerves, to the greatest—albeit deeply flawed—portable computer the universe devised: our brain.

Your pain feels small once you zoom out a little. Sure, my toe hurts now, but in 5 minutes I will probably forget that I stubbed my toe at all. The fact that I exist in a time when I won’t die from an injury like a broken toe is a miracle in and of itself. Take appendicitis—what was once a frequently fatal condition with over 50% mortality when untreated is now nearly 100% survivable with modern surgical intervention⁶. What we call non-life threatening injuries today would have most certainly been the end of your life if we roll the clock back just a few hundred years. For a planet that’s 4.54 billion years old⁷, 100 years is less than a proverbial blink of the eye.

Everyday Miracles We Take for Granted #

Beyond stubbed toes, we’re surrounded by miracles we barely notice. Your morning coffee? It required a global supply chain, selective breeding over centuries, precise roasting chemistry, and clean water that would have been unimaginable luxury for most of human history. In 1900, typhoid fever struck 100 people per 100,000; after water chlorination, it dropped to just 0.1 per 100,000⁸.

That text from a friend? You’re communicating instantly across distances that once took months to traverse. The ability to capture and share a sunset photo? You’re wielding technology that would seem like pure magic to someone from just 50 years ago.

Even our working lives have transformed dramatically. Our great-great-grandparents worked 60-70 hours per week—annual working hours have been cut by 60% since 1870⁹. In 1900, more than 1 in 5 American workers were children under age 16¹⁰. Today, we worry about work-life balance and taking “mental health days” from the comfort of climate-controlled offices, not about losing fingers in factory machinery as a 10-year-old.

Gratitude #

Being grateful is hard. Our brains and bodies evolved to survive in a much harsher reality than the one most of us (at least in the West) have to live in today, but we’re still left with evolutionary quirks that were useful at keeping us alive when we had to worry about being eaten by lions, such as generalized anxiety.

But we can forcefully remind ourselves that we are indeed quite lucky to exist. The probability of being born, in a time of relative peace, where quality of life is pretty okay for most people, is quite low. Life expectancy nearly doubled from 47.3 years in 1900 to 78.7 years by 2018¹¹. Global literacy increased from just 12% of adults in 1820 to 87% today¹². If you were born just 200 years ago, before antibiotics and modern medicine, a simple cut could mean death from infection. The percentage of child deaths from infectious diseases declined from 61.6% in 1900 to just 2% by 1998¹³. Vaccines have made common diseases that were once death sentences a thing of the past.

The Gift of Existing Against All Odds #

The universe itself appears fine-tuned for our existence. Physicists have identified six fundamental constants that must fall within extremely narrow ranges for life to exist. The cosmological constant, for instance, must be precise to 122 decimal places—if slightly larger, space would expand too rapidly for stars to form¹⁴. Roger Penrose calculated the odds of our universe’s initial conditions occurring by chance as approximately 1 in \(10^{10^{123}}\)—a number so large that if you wrote a zero on every atom in the universe, you wouldn’t have enough atoms.

So next time you stub your toe, try to remember those millions of other sperm who gave their lives, and that it was you who won the greatest lottery known to humanity. Remember that you’re experiencing a minor inconvenience in a universe that shouldn’t mathematically exist, on a planet perfectly positioned around a stable star, in a body that’s the product of 3.8 billion years of evolution, during the safest and most prosperous era in human history.

Every ordinary moment—every breath, every heartbeat, every mundane Tuesday afternoon—is statistically miraculous. We exist against odds so astronomical that mathematics itself struggles to express them in a way we can wrap our heads around. And perhaps that’s the ultimate reframe: not that we should feel grateful despite life’s difficulties, but that the very fact we’re here to experience difficulties at all is the most extraordinary gift imaginable.

There it is, written in the language of the universe—math: every day truly is a gift.