What do you attibute your good fortune to?
 

For all you fellow agnostics and aethiests out there. I've been contemplating this question lately. Besides hard work, what do you guys attribute your good fortune to? Luck? Chance? Randomness?

Being my own God. Living my life and accepting the good and bad as it comes with no one to thank or blame but myself. I look up to myself, look inward for answers and see life for what it is through my eyes rather than others and believe in myself as the only power that drives me.

Luck, timing, good fortune are available to myself for putting myself in that position. Personal responsibility for good or bad dictates my experiences which are contrived solely by my own doing. I think my way of doing things supercedes that of a higher being since I accept myself as that entity.

K A R M A

When I talk about luck I mean all of the unknown variables that are determining the outcome of some situation. There's nothing mystical about it.

That said, I think my good fortune is due to my hard work and a little bit of luck. ;)

Yes, of course luck plays a part. But it's also important to be able to take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves, and of course to act in such a way so as to generate new opportunities.

On a personal level, most of my important decisions in life have been made on instinct, a process I've grown to trust in more and more as I've grown older.

Statistics.

...a positive and constructive approach toward living in the present.

Beer and Blue Öyster Cult. The union of the perfect food and the perfect music have given me peerless good fortune.

Actually, I attribute my good fortune to good family, good friends, and good circumstances. That and using the grey stuff at the top of my neck once in a while. (No criticism of anyone else intended.)

Being born free and able.

I think luck, chance and randomness are pretty much the same. They are all a bunch of events beyond your control that work out in your favor ...or not. For the most part I attribute any good fortune to my actions. Like what ARTelevision said. If you make good decisions then things usually turn out for the good.

I second that.

good luck, i suppose.

What do you call it when you are stumbling along, tripping and falling all over the place and one time, instead of falling on jagged rocks or pointed sticks, you fall on something much softer, gentler and more inviting?

Is that luck? If it is the, Damn! Am I lucky!

Randomness, a.k.a. millions and billions of variables interfering in a cause to effect relationship to create stuff far beyond my control, for the most part. That's luck.

Nothing, I just take it as it is

Hard fucking work.

In my world, there is no such thing as luck, no chance, no regret. Only cause and effect. Everything that happens to me is a direct reflection of the actions and choices we have taken in the past. There is no fate, no big plan for me at the end of it all, there is only what I have done. Nothing controls me, but myself. Take responsibility for your decisions and never regret for what you have done, because it has lead you to where you are today. Everything is in control by the self.

It is because of the greed of rich white men that I have been able to find employment, so I suppose I owe whatever good circumstances I may have to that.

Post of the Day!


Me? Just plain luck.

I could just as easily been born in a ramshackle shanty town in Bangladesh, malnourished, forced to work from the age of 5, seen my parents and siblings die, then slip into a horrible shit-laden death from cholera myself.

Don't preach to me about God.


Mr Mephisto

I attribute the lack of good fortune to a combination of chance and laziness.

Interestingly inspiring reply, but i need to ask how do put yourself in the position of luck? wouldn't you say that there are many more outside factors that also have an effect - fateful opportunities that then allow you to seize the moment...?

but anyway,

I believe a lot in fate. Good fateful things will happen to good people. Also note that i am not religious whatsover. I have beliefs but not necessarily the god that is taught to us, so I don't believe that god puts these your way.

Instincts have always guided me through these, for better or worse, but if you trust your instincts you will learn some interesting stuff along the way.

The people who have made the most money on "who wants to be a millionairre", for example, have always gambled on the answer that first popped into their mind... no matter how many times they re-thought and questioned their own judgement. But what were the outside chances of him/her getting in the chair in the first place, and winning a mill? Their time was up but what causes it and what makes everything fall into place...?

D I T T O

.....and Ditto was his name-o.

Every being alive is lucky, which is why statistics is so hard to believe in.

Lets say you where crossing the road, and slipped. The car barely managed to swing around you in time. You where lucky you didn't get killed.

Well, not really, in retrospect. If you wheren't lucky, you wouldn't be thinking you where lucky right now.

I'm probably as close to Buddhist as one can be without technically being Buddhist (or maybe not ;) ), but one aspect that I'm not too big on is karma. When I think of my good fortune, I try to avoid attributing it to anything, aside from whomever may be directly responsible for it (eg. my parents giving me food), but I can't help but get a feeling that it is somehow due to karma, then I automatically start arguing with myself on it being due to karma because I think that believing that I have good karma will jinx my karma and I'll turn out to have bad fortune, then I think it's silly, and so on until I become thouroughly confused and decide to just accept that I'm happy with what I have or just experienced, and leave it at that. Sometimes it's best not to overthink.