melliemork.org

The probability of you existing at all is incredibly, extremely, absurdly low.

I don’t mean low in the way that getting struck by lightning twice is low. I mean, it’s so astronomically unlikely that it’s difficult for the human brain to even comprehend.

Yet here we are, scrolling on instagram reels, worrying about our next steps with school or work, wondering what to eat for dinner, acting as if existing was the default outcome.

It wasn’t.

For you to exist, your parents had to meet.

That sounds ordinary until you realize how many things had to happen for that meeting to occur. They were born in the same era. They lived close enough to eventually cross paths. Their lives unfolded in just the right way. Maybe one of them almost moved away. Maybe one almost took a different job, attended a different school, skipped the party where they met, or said no to a first date.

Every tiny decision could have eliminated the possibility of your existence.

And even after they met, there was no guarantee you would exist.

The specific sperm cell and egg cell that created you had to find each other at that exact moment. Women are born with roughly one to two million eggs, have around 300,000 by puberty, and typically ovulate only a few hundred over their lifetime. Meanwhile, men produce hundreds of billions of sperm throughout their lives. Change the timing by a day or even minutes, and a completely different person would have been born. Not you, someone else.

But your existence doesn’t just depend on your parents.

It depends on their parents’ meeting.

And their parents’ meeting.

And every generation before them.

Our ancestors survived wars, disease, famine, accidents, heartbreak, and countless moments where history could have ended for your family line. Every one of them found another person at exactly the right point in time. Every generation successfully passed life to the next until, somehow, that chain reached you. Thousands of generations and millions of tiny coincidences.

It’s one uninterrupted sequence stretching back further than you can even imagine.

And that’s just your family. 

Think about the probability of existing at the same time and place as your friends, your teachers, your partner, your pet.

Life itself is an unbelievable coincidence.

The universe is balanced on constants so precise that if they were even slightly different, reality as we know it wouldn’t exist. If gravity were stronger or weaker, if the electromagnetic force changed, if one of many constants had been altered, atoms would behave differently. Carbon might never exist in a stable form.

No carbon. No biology. No people. No you.

Are you feeling lucky yet?

Because the improbability doesn’t stop there.

Think about the life you’re living right now.

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re doing it on a phone, laptop, or another electronic device. That alone places you among a remarkably privileged portion of humanity. There are still people in the world who have never owned such a device. Some have never used the internet. Some don’t have reliable electricity. 

Now zoom out even further.

Think about history.

If you had been born during the Middle Ages, there’s a good chance you wouldn’t have survived childhood. An infection could have been fatal. There were no antibiotics, no vaccines, no emergency rooms. Even a broken bone or common cold could permanently alter your life.

And if you were born in another country, your opportunities might look completely different. Education, clean water, freedom of speech, healthcare, personal safety, and economic opportunity are not distributed equally around the world. There are so many who, unfortunately, don’t have the same freedoms as we do. 

Think about your last vacation.

The fact that you’ve ever boarded a plane, driven across a state, or explored another country isn’t normal on a global scale. It’s a privilege.

Think about school.

Whether you loved it or hated it, having access to an education is something hundreds of millions of people throughout history, and millions still alive today, never had.

Think about the fact that you can choose what career to pursue, what books to read, who to love, or what ideas to believe. 

None of these things were guaranteed. None of them had to happen. And yet they did.

Somehow, against impossible odds, you ended up here.

What’s fascinating is how quickly we adapt to miracles.

We wake up assuming tomorrow is promised. We treat running water, electricity, modern medicine, and instant communication as ordinary. We become so accustomed to our lives that we stop noticing how statistically bizarre they really are.

Instead, we focus on what we don’t have.

We compare ourselves to people with more money, more success, or more followers. We convince ourselves that life is lacking because we haven’t reached the next milestone.

But the biggest miracle already happened.

You’re here.

You won the biggest lottery of all that began billions of years ago.

That doesn’t mean life is always easy. People experience real suffering, loss, illness, injustice, and grief. Recognizing how unlikely your existence is doesn’t erase those realities.

But it can change the lens through which you see them.

It can make an ordinary Wednesday feel extraordinary.

It can remind you that your life is the result of an unimaginably long chain of events that somehow led to this exact moment.

Scientists predict the probability of your existence to be about 1 in 400 trillion. For gauge, 400 trillion seconds equates to 12.68 billion years. (that probably didn’t help…).

But the probability of you dying is 1 in 1.

So, stop being calm about our existence.

We should be a little more amazed.

Because out of every possibility that never happened, you happened.