Melancholy Content
The odds of me even being born are absurd. Add in the close calls, the emotional lows, and the strange way my brain treats happiness as a trap, and it’s a miracle I’m still here at all. What I’ve learned is that contentment, fueled by gratitude, runs deeper than any fleeting moment of happiness.
I shouldn’t be here.
Depending on who you ask, the odds of a person even being born are astronomical. Some say 1 in 400 trillion. Author Ali Binazir calculated an even more staggering number: 1 in 10^2,685,000 — a 10 with 2,685,000 zeros after it.
Either way, existence itself defies the odds.
The Earth is about 4.54 billion years old. Modern humans have been here roughly 300,000 years, and even if you count our earlier human ancestors, our kind has existed for only about 0.006% of the planet’s history.
The universe? About 13.8 billion years old. Against that backdrop, my presence here isn’t just unlikely, it’s absurd.
And yet, even after beating the odds on a cosmic scale, I still had to survive my own personal gauntlet of near-misses.
