The Math of Miracles

"In any normal person’s life, miracles should occur at the rate of roughly one per month."

In any given year, you get 12 life-changing opportunities.

Here’s physicist Freeman Dyson on the math of miracles:

“In any normal person’s life, miracles should occur at the rate of roughly one per month … During the time we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for 8 hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of 1 per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about 30,000 per day, or about 1,000,000 per month.”

So if a miracle is a 1-in-1,000,000 chance … Shouldn’t a miracle happen about once a month?

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In Same as Ever, author Morgan Housel ties Dyson’s idea into 100-year events. You know how it seems like every few years some catastrophic once-in-a-lifetime event happens?

That’s because it does.

Housel talks about hurricanes, pandemics, financial crises …. Every cataclysmic event that can happen.

“A 100-year event doesn’t mean it happens every 100 years,” Housel writes. “It means there’s about a 1 percent chance of it occurring in any given year.

“That seems low. But when there are hundreds of different independent 100-year events, what are the odds that one of them will occur in a given year?

“Pretty good.”

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If this is true for catastrophes, shouldn’t this be true for miracles, too?

But if it is, why do catastrophes seem more common? And why does it feel like we’re missing the miracles?

A few reasons:

1) Media

In journalism school, one of the first things you learn is, “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Negative headlines get more attention than positive headlines. Catastrophes dominate news cycles, while positive stories get pushed to that 30-second slot at the end of a broadcast traditionally reserved for water-skiing squirrels.

2) Negativity bias

It’s easy to blame the media for emphasizing bad over good, but we’re wired to do the same.

For most of history, our ancestors had to spend tremendous energy avoiding potential threats. That trait is still ingrained in our biology, making us more attuned to catastrophes and less likely to notice smaller, everyday miracles.

For instance: Since I was born in 1994, the S&P 500 has experienced 3 major crashes (2000, 2008, 2020). When you think about those crashes, what comes to mind? Homelessness, poverty, suicide … The worst things we know.

Oh. And since 1994, the S&P 500 has returned +1,321.76%.

How often are you hearing about that?

3) Ego

When bad things happen to us, it’s “out of our control.”

When good things happen to us, it’s because we made them happen.

We give ourselves full credit for the things we believe we’ve earned, often discounting the mini-miracles that had to fall in place for those things to happen.

You know that phrase, “You make your own luck?”

What do you think luck really is?

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For the rest of your life, you’re going to see catastrophic “once-in-a-lifetime” events splashed across your Instagram feed a few times a year.

For the rest of your life, miracles are going to happen in your life at roughly the same rate.

You’re forced to pay attention to one.

Are you looking for the other?