Born Under A Bad Sign

As Mark Twain states in his novel Pudd'nhead Wilson, "When ill luck begins, it does not come in sprinkles, but in showers.” Perhaps no one person knows this more than Bad Luck Brian. 

Ouch. 

This classic meme was born in the depths of reddit in January of 2012, featuring a middle schooler named Kyle Craven, dressed in a hideous sweater and smiling goofily for the camera. It quickly exploded in popularity, and has since become one of the most widely-known and  humorous Internet memes. The focus of this meme is Brian's truly awful luck; but is there such a thing as bad luck in real life? 

Sources say: maybe. It's true that some people really do have a lot of bad things happen to them simply by circumstance. However, those "bad things" are also influenced by one's choices, competence, the actions of others, and random chance. People tend to blend all of those factors together, attributing misfortune to superstition, or plain bad luck. Logically speaking, we should be able to determine why bad things happen to people by looking at their choices and actions, which may result in negative outcomes because of behavior. But our minds aren't wired to work that way; we believe in bad luck even when it's not there. 

Our brain is designed to find patterns in the massive quantities of information it receives; letters, numbers, sounds, and so forth. This is of course a crucial skill for human survival, but it also tends to make us spot patterns in that jumble of data that don't really exist. Essentially, our brain makes conspiracy theorists out of us all; we attribute random events to luck rather than mathematical probability and science. 

For example, people who believe that Friday the 13th is an unlucky day will attribute everything that goes wrong that day to bad luck, and will also have more things go wrong because they have preconceived expectations that can turn a minor incident- tripping over a curb- into falling into traffic and spilling hot coffee all over yourself, just because you think it's going to happen. With bad luck, we're basically the engineers of our own destruction. 

This perception of bad luck also has ramifications for how people view their own lives. This attribution of misfortune to bad luck is called psychological reversal, a subconscious method of sabotaging one's success.If we believe we suffer from bad luck, we're more likely to view events in a negative light than a positive one. Where one person might see getting locked out of their dorm room as an opportunity to walk around and explore campus, someone else (including me) could see it as another example of how nothing in their life ever goes right, woe is me, blah blah blah. Bad luck is entirely subjective; what's good for one person is terrible for the next.  As I said above, we find a good think and make it into a bad thing then blame it on the odds, all while ignoring the actual mathematical odds (or our own stupidity) that led to things going to hell. 

So if you ever find yourself blaming bad times on bad luck, just remember: it's all in your head. Don't spend the day cursing the Blue Loop for leaving you behind; instead, enjoy the walk to class and take in some of the scenery that Penn State has to offer. 

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