Why existence itself is the rarest gift.
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.
Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.”
—Richard Dawkins
A Strange Kind of Luck
At first glance, Dawkins’ words might sound grim. We’re all going to die—that’s “lucky”? But look closer. The staggering fact isn’t that we die. The staggering fact is that we get to live at all. Out of the unimaginable number of possible combinations of atoms, somehow the universe arranged itself into you, a conscious being who can see, think, feel, and care.
Every blade of grass, every rock, every storm cloud exists—but without awareness. You, on the other hand, get to register the miracle. You can taste a strawberry, hear a symphony, laugh until your ribs ache. You are one of the very few arrangements of matter in the cosmos that gets to know it’s here. That alone is astonishing.
The Anesthetic of Familiarity
And yet… we forget. We wake up, brush our teeth, scroll our feeds, rush to work. The days blur. Existence becomes background noise. Dawkins calls this the anesthetic of familiarity—we sleepwalk through the very miracle that should make us weep with gratitude.
Imagine if you had only one day of life. Wouldn’t the sunlight on your face feel unbearably precious? Wouldn’t you linger over every word spoken to you, every sip of water, every heartbeat?
We have more than one day, and that abundance tricks us into apathy.
Exercises in Perspective
So how do we shake ourselves awake? Here are a few practices:
- The Lottery Thought Experiment: Imagine a cosmic lottery with infinite tickets. Most are blanks—nonexistence. You drew the rare winning ticket: life. Every annoyance, every traffic jam, every dentist appointment is still better than the blank.
- Borrowed Eyes: Pause and imagine you’ve just landed on Earth for the very first time. What would you notice? The green of trees? The way light bends on glass? The sound of a child laughing in the next room?
- The Vanishing Game: For a moment, imagine it all gone—your morning coffee, your dog, your ability to breathe. Then look around. Everything you see is on loan, for now.
These aren’t just mental tricks. They’re ways of rewiring attention, of remembering that life isn’t guaranteed—it’s a bonus.
Living as If Life Is a Bonus
Here’s the deeper point: when you view life as an improbable win, it changes the way you approach everything. Expectations soften. Gratitude sharpens. You stop expecting the universe to constantly deliver for you, and you start savoring the fact that it exists at all.
Even ordinary days can hum with quiet wonder when seen through this lens. The dinner that isn’t gourmet but still fills your belly. The friend who texts back late but still texts back. The breath you didn’t earn but got anyway.
You don’t have to be happy every moment. You don’t have to succeed at every goal. Simply being alive is already a jackpot.
Final Thought
We are going to die, yes. But most of the universe never even gets that far. You get to live, to love, to fail, to taste, to wonder, to regret, to try again. That is luck beyond calculation.
So when the weight of expectations piles up, pause. Touch the table beneath your hand. Feel the air enter your lungs. Notice that you are here, impossibly, for a little while.
That is enough.
For more like this, visit the broader project at life-savor.com, or explore the Life Savor book itself.
To learn more about Life Savor’s philosophy,
read Life Savor: Treasuring Our Gift of Life by Erik Victor Reed.
