It won't happen to me, and other lies we tell ourselves

“Ten decisions shape your life, you’ll be aware of five, about.”

It’s a lyric from The Strokes. It’s also a surprisingly deep description of the relationship between choice, circumstance, and luck. We all tell ourselves stories about how we got to be where we are, but all good stories are built on a mixture of truth and fiction.

If you subscribe to the predictive processing theory of consciousness, then there is an uncomfortable premise beneath all self-authored stories. We never truly see the world as it is. Instead, we see a hallucination that is good enough to keep us alive. That hallucination is as much fiction as it is truth.

Among the fictions that keep us alive is a built-in optimism bias. We believe that bad things only happen to other people. We know it’s a fiction, but we allow it anyway, because it helps more than it harms. After all, too much worry paralyzes the ability to act. On the other hand, a mind that is biased towards optimism will have an advantage over the mind that simply gives up. Evolutionary forces have strengthened the optimism bias from generation to generation, but now this same bias that helped our ancestors survive threatens our species’ future.

Every human alive is the improbable survivor of countless close calls. An unbroken chain of ancestors led up to your birth. Many of your predecessors barely outran predators, or clung to life through plagues and famines, or hid as armies marched and bombs fell, until they had survived just long enough to pass down their genes. Speaking of genes, you are only the you that you are, because you got lucky that a specific sperm and a specific egg combined instead of one of hundreds of millions of other potential pairings. So far in your life you have survived everything. That time you almost stepped out in front of a moving car but didn’t? That time you slipped on the steps but caught yourself just in time? When you caught Covid and felt absolutely terrible, but it wasn’t all that bad after all?

Viewed a bit more broadly, your very existence seems so improbable that it tells the inner observer: “You must be special. To you, nothing bad can happen.” But of course you feel special. That feeling is a side effect of being here at all. If you hadn’t been lucky, then you wouldn’t be here to notice the luck. There are countless other people whose luck ran out when they least expected it to. Because the unlucky can no longer tell any stories, their silence reinforces our delusion.

In the face of improbable odds, with a necessarily limited ability to even notice the fragility of our own existence, how reliable is any of our reasoning about risk, danger, or the future? Humanity is hurtling towards an entire range of catastrophes, from climate collapse, to AI misalignment, to nuclear war, but our built-in hallucination keeps on telling us: “It’ll be fine. I will be fine. We will be fine. We always have been so far.”

Then, in certain unsettling moments, you might look at a slightly different angle, and notice the relentless cosmic roulette wheel spinning in the background. You realize all our stories about luck, meaning, and fairness are just thin sugar coatings on an indifferent void. Your entire life story, even the part as of yet untold, seems to be just a lucky pattern flickering for an ephemeral instant.

When the illusion shatters, two paths appear. On the one side is nihilism. On the other side is enlightenment, which starts by breaking free from harmful stories that we use to gently pacify ourselves into oblivion:

• Religious end-times myths (“We’re the chosen ones, we’ll be saved through divine intervention.”)
• Political complacency (“Our government system is special, it can’t really fail or fall into facist dictatorship.”)
• Techno-optimism (“Some smart person will find the solution that saves us.”)

To break free from these dangerously comfortable narratives, we must acknowledge uncomfortable statistical realities. I offer the following challenging statements:

• Every faithful believer thinks their religion is the special path to salvation, even those believers that think my own religion is a path to damnation.
• National pride and the belief in the exceptionalism of a specific country are just expressions of brand loyalty. Every country does it’s own brand marketing.
• I’m probably not lucky enough to be born into a period of safety, peace, prosperity, or reason. Even if I was fortunate enough to experience such a period, if I live long enough, I will likely outlive that period. Far more people have survived through difficult times than have ever lived in ideal conditions for their entire lives.

What do you do with this knowledge? Even if can see it all clearly, the world goes on as it was. Most people keep dreaming, but if you stay awake, then like me you might make a decision: if life is a brief signal riding a long wave of chaos, then attention to life becomes sacred.

Your ancestors survived plagues, wars, and famines so that you could be here now, not to waste their effort on comfortable delusions, but to see reality clearly enough to help steer away from catastrophe. That might mean following in their footsteps, across oceans, through revolution and great changes, to create a place for the next generation.

You might have made it here by accident, but from now on each choice, however small, is deliberate defiance against the drift. Even the most extreme statistical anomalies can still skew the odds further.

You were a coincidence. Now each act of attention says: “This is not an accident”.

Postscript: Notes & Influences Behind the Writing

In this age of LLM assisted writing, I feel obligated to share the context for this piece, and ironically this section of the essay will likely be longer than the actual body. Maybe this exhaustive exploration helps prove that the writing and thoughts originated from myself as a human. So here are the influences that were in my mind as I was writing this:

“The Strokes - I’ll try anything once” - This song came on my playlist while driving, and it’s opening line made me start thinking about choice and outcomes. What unconscious choices did I make so far, that shaped my life? What would my “ten decisions” be? Which five did I make deliberately, and which five did I not realize were going to shape things to come? I think it is a fascinating line of thought, which is why I opened this piece with this lyric.

The Libet experiments of the 1980’s - The Strokes song lyric proposes that you may not even be aware of many of the impactful choices you are making. This has an interesting overlap with the neuroscience of free will. Libet argued that we don’t really have “free will”. Monitoring of neuron activity shows that humans start building an unconscious intention to act long before they report being consciously aware of the choice they will make. In some experiments researchers were able to predict whether a subject would choose left or right, nearly ten seconds before the subject was consciously aware they would choose that direction. This suggests that perhaps the conscious mind is a passive observer that merely rationalizes a decision after the fact. In other words we don’t really have free will. Libet counterbalanced this radical idea with the concept of “free won’t”. Our decisions may originate unconsciously, but we still have a conscious veto power to reject the decisions that emerge from our subconcious.

“Blindsight” and “Echopraxia” by Peter Watts. I just finished reading these two very hard sci-fi books about identity, self awareness, and consciousness. Blindsight was written in 2006, and Echopraxia in 2014, but I find the series surprisingly prescient in it’s exploration of the impact of AI on humanity. The ultimate thesis of the series is that perhaps self awareness will end up being just a wasteful mistake of evolution, like a vestigal organ or limb that is discarded as the species evolves. Perhaps a completely unconscious “zombie”, with no ego or desires, just acting according to a rules based system, would be faster, less wasteful, and more fit for survival. It’s disturbing to think about, and Peter Watts really leans into this, with a writing style that is deliberately deeply uncomfortable.

Predictive processing theory - This has a strong overlap with the Watts books I read. Watts explores ideas of how our ability to perceive reality may diverge from reality. For example, visual agnosia, in which a patient can only notice one half of each item, despite all the neuron pathways between eyes and brain being intact. In “Blindsight”, Watts challenges readers with the idea of total, ongoing visual agnosia. How can any of us know whether we are actually seeing reality? And what if the body could react unconsciously to something that it is incapable of consciously seeing? In this current age of pervasive social media, artifically generated content, and widespread propaganda, it is harder than ever to know whether you can trust the things you see.

Divergence from your initial training data - This idea builds on a past piece that I wrote last year: “The expectation creates the result”. In that essay I propose that AI will be heavily influenced by stories about AI, and that what we expect from AI creates the final result. The “training data” we provide AI shapes it, just like our own self told stories shape us. But what about when the stories we tell ourselves aren’t true? I grew up, like many other kids, with a few prepopulated stories as initial training data: I was a member of the “one true religion”, and a citizen of the “best country on Earth”. But how true are these statements? At some point in my life I realized that perhaps the religion I had been raised in wasn’t all I thought it was. And I recently decided to move from the US to spend some time in New Zealand. Our stories could end up being a bit more mutable than we originally expected.

US politics - Over the past two weeks the United States has taken further steps in the direction of authoritarianism. Troops are being deployed to “fight crime” in American cities, the current administration has made a list of every top US company ranked by how friendly it is to his regime, and there are a variety of efforts to compromise future elections, including jerrymandering and the suggestion that women should not be allowed to vote. It is deeply strange, and a bit disorienting to balance the conflict between the necessary business of working and collecting money and paying bills and maintaining the trappings of modernity, with the fact that there is a major, disturbing shift in the entire American way of life. But US politics isn’t the only thing changing. Climate change and AI super intelligence alignment challenges are both on the horizon. While writing this piece I was considering the long term cost of supressing your worry about the future and trudging forward through routines that may not even make sense in the long term. “Keep calm and carry on” only works if you aren’t carrying on toward disaster!

A chat with ChatGPT about luck - 40% of people will get cancer in their lifetime, but it’s somewhat difficult to imagine yourself as one of those 4 in 10. People build houses in flood plains and other areas that will almost certainly be devastated in the near future. This is because we have a tendency to imagine ourselves staying safe, while bad things only happen to other people. Why is this? Where does this way of thinking come from and what purpose does it serve? ChatGPT had some ideas, and they helped seed the thoughts in this post.

Albert Camus and Alan Watts - Early this year I wrote “How strange it is to be anything at all”, in which I explored similarities between these two great philosophers and their takes on the meaning of life. I deeply appreciate the Camus idea of rebelling against the traditional struggle to find meaning, combined with the Watts philosophy of finding meaning via radical self awareness that one is a piece of the broader whole. The conclusion of this essay is heavily colored by this carefully counterbalanced combination of the two philosophers.

The social media share image - I generated the image at the top of this essay using GPT-5. It features The Tower tarot card, with a bit of influence from “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”. I’ve always been deeply fascinated by the idea of disaster, collapse, and inevitable change. Of course, that does have something to do with growing up in a Christian religion that believes Armageddon is just around the corner! I probably won’t ever completely drop that line of thought, as I think it has certain utility and benefits. In my 20’s I even chose to embrace the idea of collapse and change by getting a full sleeve tattoo of tarot cards, most prominently featuring The Tower. To me The Tower card represents the dissolution of one way of life, while falling into another. Change is not always bad. Maybe The Tower is not a good thing, and it’s collapse might feel more liberating than destructive.

So there it is: the context behind the piece. Perhaps this section benefits me more than you as the reader, but I share it anyway, as I found it interesting to explore what “context” my brain was working with as I wrote. What separates the human mind from the AI mind is that ability to iteratively self reflect with layers of synthesis that current models are nowhere near capable of. But maybe that’s just me, with an optimism bias, thinking about AI outsmarting humans, and over confidently stating “It won’t happen to me”.