On Bad Luck

You were never unlucky. What has happened is in keeping with reason.

Mar 16, 2026

Ludovic Alleaume - *Beethoven Listening to Muse*, 1928. At this time Beethoven was growing deaf, the cruelest imaginable loss for a musician. Yet there he is, eyes closed, in absolute surrender to his muse, to that inner vision that transcends what his ears could no longer reliably tell him.

“Whenever you find yourself blaming providence, turn it around in your mind and you will see that what has happened is in keeping with reason.” - Epictetus

Bad things will happen to you. Not might- will. Perhaps someone you trusted will look you in the eye and lie. A person you love will get sick, and the doctors will use words that feel fictional. You’ll pour yourself into work for months and watch it go nowhere, or worse, watch someone else get the credit. And in those moments- sitting in a hospital waiting room, or staring at your phone after a conversation that just ended everything, or lying awake at 2am running the same loop- the hardest thing in the world is to believe that any of this makes sense.

Why me? You’ll think.

Here's the thing the Stoics mastered- and they figured it out the hard way, which is the only way anything real gets figured out- there’s a hidden logic running beneath all this you’re going through, and they called it logos. Not God in the Sunday-school sense, more like what Heraclitus meant when he said you can’t step into the same river twice- the water is always new, yet the river persists. The riverbed holds the course. The events in your life have a structure to it, a grammar, even when it reads like pure gibberish. Marcus Aurelius kept returning to this truth from a military tent, Seneca from the gilded cage of Nero’s court who later killed him on malicious grounds, both of them writing for survival, retracing their steps back to the same ether- that what looks like disorder from inside it is, from far enough out, a sensible pattern. You just happen to be very, very close to it right now.

Nietzsche, who was himself a catastrophe of a human life- migraines, loneliness, eventual madness- called the right response amor fati, the love of fate. Not merely tolerating what happens to you but actually wanting it, the way a serious athlete wants to be pushed until her legs give out, because she understands that the session that kicks her ass the most is also the one that rebuilds her stronger. Schopenhauer, who was constitutionally incapable of looking on the bright side, God bless his soul, put it more honestly- the world will grind through you regardless, so you may as well be conscious while it does. And Machiavelli, while facing exile, gave it a practical edge- fortune owns half your life, he wrote, but the other half belongs to whoever shows up with enough nerve to work with what they've been handed. Three deeply unhappy men who nonetheless understood something most cheerful people never do- the hard stuff is the material. It's all raw material.

Epictetus knew this better than almost anyone. He was a slave who got his leg broken by his master- deliberately, casually, the way you’d snap a piece of stick- and he walked with that limp for the rest of his life. And what he built out of that experience was a philosophy so beautiful and so unbreakable it outlasted the empire around it. His whole teaching comes down to one distinction- some things are in your control, and some things are not. Other people’s choices, the randomness of fortune, the body’s vulnerability- none of that is under your command. What is yours, always, is how you interpret what happens and what you choose to do next. That’s it. Hold that line and almost nothing can touch you. Boethius tested this from the hardest possible angle- a scholar and statesman who went from the height of Roman political life to a prison cell in a single season, writing his masterwork the night before they executed him. His argument was almost counterintuitive- what we call bad luck is only bad luck from where we’re standing. Fortune is a wheel, he said, always turning, and the person who has staked their happiness on its heights is already in the middle of falling, whether they feel it yet or not. The stable place is somewhere the wheel can’t reach- in the character you build, the choices you make, the person you become regardless of where the wheel drops you. Rilke said something similar, though warmer, in a letter to a young poet who was drowning in uncertainty of the industry. Be patient with everything unsolved in your heart, he wrote. Love the questions themselves. Because one day- and you won’t notice the exact moment it happens- you’ll have simply lived your way into the answer.

So stop waiting for your luck to get better, because it won’t- at least not on a schedule you control. The logos is already working. Trust it, show up, and meet the full weight of this moment. And trust me- that’s the most radical act of faith you can make.

Rilke ends today’s piece with this poem,