The world is a random place. Within the universe, randomness touches everything—from an asteroid obliterating a planet, to a pyroclastic flow burying a town, to being born into a supportive family, and even falling in love with the person of your dreams.1 In math, this can be described as stochastic, and in nature, this can be described as the brutality of The Wild.
I was recently reminded about this brutal randomness when someone referenced Unforgiven. Disregarding the Western trope of the good guy overcoming the outlaws, this movie shows how the American Frontier was simply brutal and that some things just happen.2 At the climax of the movie, Little Bill (Gene Hackman) is mortally wounded by William Munny (Clint Eastwood). Lying on his back, Little Bill makes one last plea saying, “I don’t deserve this.” Without emotion, Munny replies, “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”
This reminder took me aback as I reflected on how the world is filled with randomness, colored in a spectrum of positive and negative outcomes. Obviously, for Little Bill, it was negative, but say for me, sitting next to someone during freshman orientation and making a best friend was positive. While I believe that “luck favors the prepared,” I also believe that the universe still gets a vote, including all the randomness that accompanies it. And I think resilience comes from being able to play a bad hand well and not from always being dealt aces.
From inside a concentration camp, where almost every axis of a person’s life was seized at random, Viktor Frankl concluded that one thing still couldn’t be taken from him, “to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”3 Munny’s trigger-pull represents the same idea. He didn’t choose the circumstance that put a gun back in his hand, any more than Little Bill chose to be on the wrong end of it, but what he did inside that circumstance was entirely his. The universe deals the hand; what we do with it is the vote we still get to cast.
So it’s not randomness versus us, but randomness plus us. A stochastic process is rarely pure noise. Mathematically, it’s noise plus a drift term, a small consistent bias that decides where the whole thing lands even though no single draw is predictable. The asteroid, the pyroclastic flow, the friend I happened to sit next to at orientation—none of that was mine to set. But the drift is. Little Bill never got a vote in what killed him. Munny got a vote in what kind of man pulled the trigger. I don’t know yet what my own drift term adds up to, only that showing up to bias it, is the closest thing to control I was ever going to get.