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Comment by gyardley | Hacker News Reader

You get $1M for a few months work because you work hard to put yourself in a position where you potentially could get $1M for a few months work, and then you get a little bit (okay, perhaps more than a little bit) lucky.

It's interesting how different people react differently with respect to wealth. My relatively modest personal success is by no means solely a product of hard work - yes, I put myself in a position where I could get lucky, but I still needed a hell of a lot of luck. I didn't always know what I was doing, and things could've just as easily gone south.

That said, I've never felt the slightest bit of guilt over anything related to money. The way I see it, undeservedly, disproportionately good things happen all the time in our society, and they have to happen to somebody. Why shouldn't that somebody be me?

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I'm all for attributing success to hard work, but it's hard to deny that a large part is also having the right kinds of smarts. Perhaps you lump that in with "luck," but if so, that makes luck into an incredible catch-all.

It can be a real struggle to wrestle with the guilt of catching so many fortunate breaks in life. Not having a mental illness. Not growing up in a ghetto. Access to a good education. Parents who loved me.

I'll have to try out your last statement in your post. I tend to ask myself "Why should it be me?" What a great idea to respond with the question "Why shouldn't it be me?"

That's also interesting to me.

I've caught the same lucky breaks that you have, more or less, but why feel guilty over them? After all, you didn't put in a special request for them. There was no one moment when you said "hey, god, why don't you give the lousy parents and schizophrenia to that other guy over there?"

I do feel guilt over things in my past, but they've all been things I've actively and consciously done.

I suppose it's because some of the people whom I'm closest to are the same ones who had the unlucky breaks.

I honestly wonder how much I can attribute to myself. I've always been interested in learning, math, logic, understanding... but why was I interested in the first place? I was born with the gift of natural curiosity... and that was one of my earliest and most profound strokes of good fortune.

When I question whether I can even take credit for my drive to succeed, it really calls into question what I can take credit for at all.

The Veil of Ignorance concept might suggest you feel guilty if you don't take actions that would have helped the many alternate yous that didn't get those breaks:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance

What an interesting thought experiment. Thanks for sharing.

So if something horrible happened to you - arising out of social structures, rather than getting hit by lightning, if you see what I mean - would you accept it with similar equanimity?

Yes, I see what you mean.

I make a distinction between the luck (or the lack of it) coming from societal structures, and the luck (or the lack of it) that comes from random events, chance meetings, the black box that is the AppStore, and so on. I was talking more about the latter, while it sounds like you're talking about the former. If you've been unlucky because of an accident of birth, rather than a random event, I wouldn't expect you to just shrug it off.

While I've been more lucky than not, when I have been unlucky (primarily with my health, this last year was a little dodgy in a life-threatening sort of way) then yes, I've been pretty blasé about it.

Different generations also have access to different opportunities.

indeed, my parents are often flustered in trying to wrap their head around the tech start-up industry. They were worrying about world wars erupting, history repeating itself, and other very harsh realities of the times.

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