cheryl
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The unreality of luck - Aeon
Optimists believe in good luck, pessimists in bad. But if it’s all a matter of perspective, does luck even exist
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was a technical draughtsman for oil tankers when in the summer of 1945 his employer Mitsubishi Heavy Industries sent him to the Japanese city of Hiroshima for a lengthy business trip. His visit ended abruptly when the B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped the Little Boy atomic bomb on 6 August, and the equivalent of 15 kilotons of TNT exploded less than two miles away. Even though Yamaguchi was inside the ‘instant death zone’, he managed to escape with only burns, temporary blindness and ruptured eardrums. He headed back home to Nagasaki and, despite his injuries, was able to report to work on 9 August. Yamaguchi’s supervisor couldn’t believe his wild story about a single bomb that instantly destroyed a city and, just as he was telling Yamaguchi that his tale was crazy talk, the room filled with an unearthly, solar-white light as the Fat Man bomb detonated over Nagasaki. Yamaguchi somehow survived that blast too, and lived until 2010, when he died at the ripe old age of 93.
Was Yamaguchi lucky or unlucky? On the one hand, he was a simple businessman who was nuclear-bombed twice, which sounds about as unlucky as someone could possibly be. On the other hand, he was a survivor of the two deadliest bombs ever used in war, and still lived to old age, facts that make him seem wondrously lucky.
Optimists believe in good luck, pessimists in bad. But if it’s all a matter of perspective, does luck even exist
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was a technical draughtsman for oil tankers when in the summer of 1945 his employer Mitsubishi Heavy Industries sent him to the Japanese city of Hiroshima for a lengthy business trip. His visit ended abruptly when the B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped the Little Boy atomic bomb on 6 August, and the equivalent of 15 kilotons of TNT exploded less than two miles away. Even though Yamaguchi was inside the ‘instant death zone’, he managed to escape with only burns, temporary blindness and ruptured eardrums. He headed back home to Nagasaki and, despite his injuries, was able to report to work on 9 August. Yamaguchi’s supervisor couldn’t believe his wild story about a single bomb that instantly destroyed a city and, just as he was telling Yamaguchi that his tale was crazy talk, the room filled with an unearthly, solar-white light as the Fat Man bomb detonated over Nagasaki. Yamaguchi somehow survived that blast too, and lived until 2010, when he died at the ripe old age of 93.
Was Yamaguchi lucky or unlucky? On the one hand, he was a simple businessman who was nuclear-bombed twice, which sounds about as unlucky as someone could possibly be. On the other hand, he was a survivor of the two deadliest bombs ever used in war, and still lived to old age, facts that make him seem wondrously lucky.