The Hopeful Solace of Randomness

Just two years ago, I was a seeker, hoping to find some purpose underlying my relatively fortunate life. But after the last two years, the very idea seems absurd. Today, I find hope and comfort in the world's randomness. If God plays dice with the universe, I think we may be in the best of all possible worlds.

My first sixty years were mostly very good. Then in 2019, after collapsing on the street, I learned that I was facing open heart surgery, specifically a septal myectomy, in which the wall of my heart would be shaved down from the inside. I'd known for decades that I had hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), but until then I had been considered asymptomatic.

A septal myectomy is major surgery, to be followed by months of recovery. My odds overall were pretty good, but I'm a mathematician, and I knew that the odds of my dying were better than any lottery ticket ever printed.

Weirdly, however, I was told that this potentially deadly surgery was not urgent, and that the timing was up to me. My increased risk of sudden cardiac death could be managed with a much smaller surgery to implant a cardiac defibrillator. But without the big surgery, my symptoms would grow steadily worse, while the risks of the surgery would also grow as I aged. At 62, I didn't want to wait until both my quality of life and my chances of recovery were much worse, but I wanted some time to prepare myself. I gave myself a year. I decided to have the big surgery at the end of 2020. I began a slow process of sorting out my finances and affairs, winding down my career, and preparing myself emotionally and spiritually for the possibility that my life was nearing its end.

Naively, I saw dying in surgery as the worst-case scenario. But the pandemic year brought a torrent of suffering to my family, including the sudden death of one daughter, the very slow death of another's husband (as we cared for three young grandchildren), a third's miscarriage, and roughly a dozen surgeries, debilitating illnesses, and other emergencies in my immediate family. As the pandemic raged, our family was broken with grief.

As a mathematically minded person, all through this I kept musing on the unlikeliness of encountering so many crises and tragedies in such a short time, in stark contrast to the experience of my previous six decades. It was an impressive streak of bad luck, but luck is a concept that only makes sense in a world with a purpose. In a purposeless world, events are random. Past effects do not predict future events, and no mysterious cosmic hand is guiding events. Over the long run, things even out, or more technically, "revert to the mean." I took a great deal of comfort from the thought of reversion to the mean. I wanted to believe that the next year was likely to be just "average," a big step up from the nightmare I was living. My belief in reversion to the mean was more comforting than any God so cruel as to treat me like Job, or any supernatural world where such tragedies served a necessary purpose. At least in a random world, the universe wasn't conspiring against me.

With my son-in-law dying I did not, as planned, have my big surgery in December 2020. I decided to put it off one more year, though my symptoms were slowly worsening. By June, I couldn't climb more than a dozen or so steps without being out of breath. I was phasing myself into retirement, reaching out to old friends about unfinished business, and generally trying to prepare myself to face the surgery without regrets.

And then a miracle occurred.

I enrolled in a clinical trial of a new medication. Within a week, all of my symptoms completely vanished. But it didn't stop there: my lifelong heart murmur vanished as well. Even more surprisingly, I was also relieved of lifelong athletic limitations I had never known were due to HCM. A few weeks after starting the drug, I climbed 300 steps and immediately began jogging out of sheer elation. I found I could run more than I ever could when I was as a child. At 63, I was in the best shape of my life.

This triggered a series of insights into my childhood, epiphanies about my life experience, and -- instead of retirement -- an exciting new job at 64. After my hellish 2020, there was no doubt that 2021 was the best year of my life. As I write this, nine months after the miracle, I am healthier, happier, and more hopeful than I have ever been.

The apparent randomness of all of this was inescapable. I had done nothing to cause or deserve my miracle. With my year of tragedies fresh in mind, I knew my fortunes could reverse again at any moment. I had always believed in savoring the good in the present moment, but had found it hard to do in practice. Now, knowing randomness to my bones, savoring the moment feels like the most natural thing in the world. My belief in life's randomness had been a comfort to me in hard times, and it became a constant reminder to savor the good times.

Obviously my cure was the kind of miracle anyone would rejoice in. But having it happen almost immediately after all that illness and death was like going straight from a sauna to an icy pond. Having survived the shock, I feel like I am seeing things more clearly than ever before.

I don't pretend to actually know whether life has a purpose. I've looked pretty hard for one, but then I'm just a short-lived primate orbiting a minor star among 200 sextillion others. If there is a purpose, I doubt that I could understand or affect it, even if I somehow managed to find it. Whether or not the world is random and purposeless, it will always seem that way to my limited mind.

What I've come to realize, however, is that this is great news. The big questions are simply unanswerable, and there's no beyond-doubt evidence of a greater purpose -- of God, karma, or destiny plotting a coherent path for us. We have to make do with the information we have, and there's no point in asking, "Why?"

In a random universe, no one is watching over us, but no one is out to get us either. Even the longest streak of apparent "luck" can turn on a dime. In bad times, we can take comfort from reversion to the mean, while in good times it can remind us to cherish what we have now. Bad luck doesn't mean you're bad, and good luck doesn't mean you're good. People who are doing better or worse than you aren't doing so because of some cosmic design or justice. We're all in this together, and the best strategy for a happy life is to help each other out when we can.

Assuming a world without purpose frees us to live our best lives, without trying to curry favor with, second-guess, or rail against something incomprehensibly larger than ourselves. It illuminates the futility of wishing things were other than they are. But we can use this knowledge to savor and share our transient joys, to comfort and relieve each other's transient suffering, and to help each other enjoy the ride.