How to Be Happy #39: Thank Your Lucky Stars

The pull quote above pops out in an Aeon essay by Timm Triplett titled “You’re Astonishing!” Tim begins his story by noting that his grandfather was doing business in England and about to step onto the Titanic to return home when he got a sales invitation to Scotland and canceled his ticket. Tim writes, “If the story is true, then, but for a chance communication from a Scottish businessman, I would never have come into existence.”

He then offers this observation from a fellow philosopher:

If you concentrate hard on the thought that you might never have been born — the distinct possibility of your eternal and complete absence from this world — I believe you too will find that this perfectly clear and straightforward truth produces a positively uncanny sensation.

Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (1986)

Stumbling upon this article was serendipitous today. Earlier, I had been cleaning the detritus out of my important-document lock box and came across my birth certificate. I came into this world at 7:15 a.m. on August 25 at Sacred Heart Hospital in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. My parents were both 22 years old. They had grown up within a block or two of each other in the neighborhood between Birch and Omaha Streets and not far from Longfellow School. They had known each other almost their entire lives.

My mother and her parents ended up in Eau Claire after a long string of begets and begots that hinged on one predecessor deciding to stay and fight (at Bunker Hill) with the American Revolution rebels as the rest of his Tory relatives slunk back to England. My father was there because his father, a Norwegian national, had decided to emigrate to Wisconsin, which had a large Scandinavian population, and because my paternal grandmother’s parents, also Norwegian, had emigrated there also. What are the odds? As Triplett puts it, “When one reflects on all the things that had to have happened exactly as they did in fact happen in order for one to be born, astonishment is a reasonable and appropriate emotion.”

Triplett goes on to observe that there are those who don’t consider their existence to be astonishing, among them weary parents, no-nonsense naturalists, theists, and Leibnizians (see Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz). These naysayers don’t get the big picture, Triplett thinks:

The proper comparison is not to those who share this planet with you, but to all those who might have been born instead of you, had the world gone a different way. All those who have ever lived are but an incomprehensibly tiny fraction of those possible persons who might have lived but never will.

Triplett is astounded in another way: he seems flabbergasted that “so many people treat the fact of their existence as unremarkable.” We should, he argues, be astonished at the fact that we, well, exist and even cultivate that emotion “since it is appropriate and life-enhancing.”

So, I am following his lead here and making today’s lesson on how to be happy simply this: say to yourself “Je suis étonnant!” or, in plain English, “I am astonishing!” Because you are.

(Image: RMS Titanic. Public domain.)