Let’s talk about luck. Many of us frequently bemoan our misfortunes, all the way from flat tires and parking tickets to shattered retirement funds and cancer diagnoses. We humans sure do have a funny way of looking at luck, don’t we? It seems that no matter how well our lives are going overall, a single bad outlying event can bring on frustration, anger, despair, or (as my Magic-playing friends like to describe it) “tilt”.

How often, on the other hand, do we stop to consider just how well our lives are going? According to the Population Reference Bureau (http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx) over 100 billion people have ever lived. Right now, there are a little over seven billion living people, and if you are reading this, you are among the blessed few who have the powerful combination of English literacy and internet access.

So how lucky are you? Well, let’s start by affirming that you’re luckier than all the people who were born before the twentieth century, which has seen humanity gain such advances as widespread vaccination, home heating and air-conditioning (in the Western world, at least, but I’ll get to that), automobiles, airplanes, television, the internet, and most importantly, real social mobility.

For simplicity’s sake, that cuts out all but the people currently alive (and a select few thousand royalty, billionaires, and other unique and extraordinary outliers from the past).

Now, you most likely live in a place with indoor plumbing, a grocery store within driving distance, internet access, and countless other comforts of modern first-world life. How many people do you think miss out on those? A recent Washington Post article put that figure at about 4.4 billion. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/02/4-4-billion-people-around-the-world-still-dont-have-internet-heres-where-they-live/) Well, a lot of those people live in places with poor or nonexistent infrastructure, and there is likely significant overlap with a lack of indoor plumbing, heating and air-conditioning, or even running water. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say that you are luckier than those 4.4 billion people. That leaves 3% of the people who have ever lived who are even in the same realm of discussion as you.

Now it gets a little trickier, because readers may have different experiences beyond the shared commonalities of living contemporaneously and living in an Internet-connected (and by proxy, connected to the benefits of the modern world) area.

To start to pare it down even more, I am going to make some assumptions that will expose my bias about my life and the lives of those around me, but I hope that it will remain instructive even if you do not specifically have the same circumstances as me.

I was born into an upper-middle-class house in a safe, suburban enclave in the United States of America. If you are reading this, perhaps this description fits you. If you are an exception, then the fact that you managed to improve your life to the point where you do have the leisure time to read this article should tell you that you are exceptionally fortunate regardless.

Let’s assume that you had a reasonably stable and loving family life, have managed to avoid significant financial or health hardship, and have every opportunity to craft your future as you choose. I’d say that cuts away over half of the remaining slice of humanity and puts you in the rarefied air of the luckiest billion or so people who have ever lived, wouldn’t you?

(Cue gripes about the 1%…hint: we are all the 1%)

But I’ll go further (and get way more controversial, if I haven’t already). Shave off another piece of the pie if you’re white, because you don’t have to worry about being the next Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, or Trayvon Martin. Shave off a big ol’ slice if you’re a man, because despite all the gigantic leaps forward that women have made in the last half-century, the simple fact is that men have the advantage when it comes to achieving success in the professional arena, because of numerous subconscious psychological and cultural “bugs” that tilt the playing field in favor of guys. (In many cases this is due to “societal lock-in”).

The last sweeping generalizations before I leave you to contemplate your fantastic fortune are, of course, your intelligence and your age. (If you are old and/or dull, please recognize that this section is directed towards a very specific audience, the ones who make up the bulk of my blog readers).

Let’s say you’re a pretty bright individual. I’m sure most of you are. If you think you’re smarter than most of your peers, you’re lucky! You have a free bonus gift to go with your already-spectacular birth circumstances, and you can use those extra megahertz between your ears to achieve your goals even more easily. I hope you use your extra IQ points well!

Now, let’s talk about your age. Most of you still have many fruitful years ahead of you, ripe with opportunity to see the continuing improvements in quality and duration of life thanks to technological innovation. I mean, we have smartphones, we’ll have self-driving cars in a few years, not to mention quantum computers and more better vaccines and treatments for disease. Who knows what awesome inventions await us next? If we’re lucky enough, we might even pull off Ray Kurzweil’s long-shot dream, and conquer aging itself. Being able to choose when we’re ready to go would be the ultimate freedom, the biggest river card we could ever be dealt, so to speak.

I know that thanks to hedonic adaptation, we find misfortune in the variance of everyday life. Sometimes it pays to look at the big picture, and recognize that in the big game of life, we are holding just about the best possible hand. So…how are you going to play it?

(P.S. For what it’s worth, I guesstimated myself as one of the luckiest 10 million people to ever live, so in the top 1% of the top 1% of people’s lives. Pretty extreme, but I tend to be a bit optimistic. Where do you think you fall?)