Someone recently asked why I am so passionate about helping others, where that comes from, especially in the effort to prevent suicide. I will answer it thusly:
Someone recently asked why I am so passionate about helping others, where that comes from, especially in the effort to prevent suic*de. I will answer it thusly:
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton.
We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?” - Richard Dawkins
Consider that we have 46 chromosomes. We get 23 each from our mother and father. That means that, at conception, the parents can produce 8,388,608 different zygotes. Put differently, just looking at our parents alone, we have one chance in 8,388,608 of actually being conceived! One different chromosome from either parent, and "I" wouldn't be here...someone else would.
But our parents, too, had parents. Each of our parents had a one in 8,388,608 chance of ever existing! So, considering only our parents and grandparents, we had one chance in 4,955,301,002,122,424,851,168 of ever being conceived! Go back another generation, and the numbers truly do become, in Dawkins' words, "megahyperastronomical!"
The odds of winning Powerball are one in 292,201,338!
When Dawkins says "we won the lottery of birth against all odds," he ain't just a shittin'! That's the reason for my passion. I won the lottery and was born. It is my duty and responsibility to sort of "pay-it-forward," and help other people know how truly lucky we all are that our parents gave exactly the 23 chromosomes they gave that resulted in us!
If you're still reading, consider this also: I am here despite unimaginable odds. You are here despite unimaginable odds. What are the odds of you and I both being here, right now, in this time, together?!?!?!?!?!

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