Are We Lucky to Be Alive?

Short Answer: No

You can’t roll again.

It is commonly assumed and declared that, except possibly in a few extremely dire cases of unrelenting misery, people are fortunate to be alive. But can this actually be said? Are we really lucky to have been born?

01 If we are asking whether a given person is statistically lucky to have been born, in the manner in which we typically analyze mathematical propositions, the answer seems to be yes. The exact sperm-egg combination that resulted in any specific human being alive today, coming at the end of an incomprehensibly long and precise series of events that culminated in the sexual union of the person’s biological parents, arguably going all the way back to the beginning of the universe, is only one in — let’s just say, for expediency’s sake — a gazillion. So in that sense, any person’s existence is exceedingly improbable, and thus, “lucky”.

02 On the other hand, taking a strictly deterministic view, positing that the entire chronology since the Big Bang is simply one gigantic chain of cause and effect, everything that ever happened — including your birth — inexorably had to happen, meaning that the odds of you being born were 100%. In that sense, no one’s existence is “lucky” at all. It could not have been otherwise.

03 But people who believe that they, and others, are lucky to be alive generally aren’t thinking about it in terms of probability or causation. Rather, they just intuitively feel that it is good to be alive. They might even say, with a knowing smile, “Consider the alternative.” So let’s do that.

04 First, we need to identify what “the alternative” is. Usually, the alternative to life is supposed to be obvious — death. More precisely, what is meant is that the only alternative to living — that is, to going on living — is dying. No matter how unhappy or disappointing their lives might be, the vast majority of people presently alive do not want to die. To most, even if painless and/or the gateway to some blissful afterlife, death is a terrifying prospect, to be avoided at all costs. So if that’s the alternative, clearly (again, except in the most dire cases), it’s worse than living. But if we’re considering whether it’s good that we came into being in the first place — whether we’re lucky to have become alive — then the alternative isn’t death or dying; it’s never existing at all. That is the proper basis of comparison.

05 Nonexistence, by definition, cannot be assessed subjectively (i.e., from the point of view of the person who doesn’t exist); but we might try to evaluate it objectively, so that it can then be weighed against being alive. Significantly, since nonexistence has no material or immaterial attributes (see Article 1), it can only be characterized by what is absent from it; by what it lacks. Nonexistence, of course, lacks everything, which means it doesn’t include the two driving features of human life — pleasure and suffering. With this in mind, let’s attempt to make our comparison.

06 Consider a hypothetical living person, George. By virtue of his existence, George is subjected to an array of experiences throughout the course of his life. In the broadest sense, we can classify these experiences as either pleasure or suffering. Before George was born, he did not exist. Therefore, we might say that (1) before George was born, he did not experience any pleasure or any suffering; (2) if George was never born, he would never have experienced any pleasure or suffering; and (3) until George was born, his situation was neutral. Then we might look at the way George’s life is now unfolding and weigh the total amount of George’s pleasure against the total amount of his suffering, to date, so as to reach a determination as to whether George has experienced, on balance, more pleasure or more suffering after he was born, and compare this to George’s status before he was born.

07 If George has experienced net pleasure while being alive, which is more pleasure than he experienced while not being alive (zero), we might conclude it is good that George was born. Conversely, if George experienced net suffering while being alive, which is more suffering than he experienced while not being alive (zero), we might conclude it is bad that George was born. Others might ignore the relative amounts of George’s pleasure and suffering altogether in the belief that, no matter how much suffering a person endures, there is always a positive value to being alive. To such optimists, George’s life is inherently positive, which is greater than the value of his not being alive (neutral), making it good that he was born.

08 The trouble with this analysis is that, despite our attempt to be objective, we’re still looking at things from George’s point of view. We can’t refer to prenatal George not experiencing any pleasure (i.e., being deprived of pleasure), or not experiencing any suffering (i.e., being spared suffering), or even being in a neutral situation. Before being born, George cannot be in any situation, because there is no George at all. So regardless of whether, after birth, George’s life is deemed to have a positive or a negative value, there’s no prior state to compare it to, and thus no basis on which to decide whether it is good or bad for George that he is alive.

09 There is also an important time element involved. George’s life, like all of our lives, has its ups and downs, which means that the relative amounts of pleasure and suffering he’s experienced will be in constant flux. Moreover, however George’s life goes, he won’t be alive for very long (see Article 5), and afterward he will revert to nonexistence. So even if George’s life is a net positive for him right now, and that alone allows us to say — or at least allows him to say — it was a good thing that he was born, this would only be true as long as George’s pleasure continues to outweigh his suffering; and in any case, no longer than the brief, transitory period of George’s lifetime.

10 Once George dies, the essential experiencer — George — disappears, along with all the benefits he may have obtained while alive. If we exclude fanciful “life after death” scenarios, postmortem George can’t look back with nodding satisfaction from beyond the grave on a mostly pleasurable existence and conclude that it was worth it. The ledger is erased forever.

11 To avoid this problem, we might try to restate the comparison as one between a universe with George and a universe without him. If we adopt the premise that pleasure is good and suffering is bad, not just for the individual human being who is pleased or who suffers, but in the context of the universe as a whole, then it follows that the creation of a person whose life turns out to be mostly pleasurable is “good” in that general, cosmic sense, and the creation of a person whose life turns out to be mostly suffering is “bad” in the same way. Thus, if George experiences more pleasure than suffering during the course of his life, it is good that he was born, and if George experiences more suffering than pleasure, it is bad that he was born – not for him, personally, but rather for some overarching notion of universal harmony.

12 But why should it matter to an amoral, indifferent universe whether there is more pleasure or more suffering to the few sentient, short-lived inhabitants of its limitless continuum? Why, on a cosmic scale, is pleasure good and suffering bad, when the setup seems to function just as well with any amount of either – and, if anything, appears biased toward the latter? In truth, the universe doesn’t care about George; he’s just another thing that happened.

13 Maybe even though the universe doesn’t care about George, we do. Regardless of George’s internal cost/benefit calculations, during his life, and even afterward, George is also a cause of or a factor in the pleasure and suffering of others, intentionally and unintentionally, directly and indirectly. If we could somehow add up all of the positive impacts of George’s existence and all of the negative impacts of George’s existence to other people and determine that the cumulative positive impacts are greater, then we might conclude it was lucky that George was born, even if we can’t say it was lucky for him.

14 Suppose, for example, that George is George Washington — in that instance, we might readily believe that his outsized historical importance had a substantial positive impact on hundreds of millions or even billions of people who lived during or after his lifetime, and, therefore, it was a good thing that he was born. Yet even if this is true, it means, at most, that a life may be good for others, but not for the person who actually has to live it. Even George Washington was not lucky to be alive for his own sake, because he would not be any worse off if he’d never been born.

15 For George, and for all of us, prenatal nonexistence is total and absolute. It offers no point of reference, manifests no antecedent reality to which we might compare our postnatal lives. Within the internally constructed world of our self-referential minds, it is as if we have always existed, because we can’t conceptualize anything else. So while, once we’re alive, we may be glad to go on living, none of us can conclude that we were lucky to have been born. Indeed, in a metaphysical sense, no one “is born” (has a subjective experience of their creation) at all. They simply find themselves to exist, whether they like it or not.