You are lucky. Obscenely, insanely, absurdly lucky. I am too. Look around you. Everyone you see is a member of an almost infinitely exclusive club: the club of existence. Even after the convoluted sequence of events that led your parents to decide to pass on their genes, your existence was by no means assured. The odds were against it, in fact, by three million to one. And yet if you’re reading this, that one in three million became reality, as it did for every one of your direct ancestors-and there have been a lot. In the past one hundred years or so, you’ve had 14: your parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. In the past six hundred years, you’ve had over a billion. Apart from giving you bragging rights that you’re directly related to someone famous (even though everyone else is too), this should start to give you an idea of how lucky you really are.

And when you think how each of your direct ancestors escaped death before having children, it only gets better. My family loves to tell the story of how my great-grandmother and her family had tickets for the Titanic; on the day of departure, they decided to postpone their trip until a sick family member recovered. It’s a great story, but just one of my ancestors’ countless brushes with death.

Considering the infinitesimally low odds that you are in the world, allow me to re-welcome you to existence. You made it to the party! And yet we never think of it that way. When we feel singled out by the universe, it’s almost always because we feel unlucky. I’m not disputing the truth of what we say when we complain, but I am saying we forget how dramatically our good luck outweighs our bad. And I’m not going to tell you to stop and smell the roses, because there are Hallmark cards for that. But the fact we can do that at all is, in a word, miraculous.

The writer Jostein Gaarder observed how terribly sad it is “that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as incredible as living.” Born-again Christians often say they found “new life” in Jesus Christ; what about becoming a born-again person, appreciative of the chance to exist? Children love to ask “why,” and to keep asking it until the adults they’re interrogating cut the chain of questioning short with “Because I said so.” We grow up and stop asking why, but it’s not because we ever got a better answer than “Because I said so.” The world is just as absurd as it was when we were children, but now we’re used to it.

But we don’t have to be. We’re not only lucky to be here; we’re lucky to be able to ask “why,” even if we never figure out the answer. We may never win another lottery, but the one we’ve already won is the best one there is.

Weinberg sophomore Hayley MacMillen can be reached at [email protected].