Your amazing life: why luck is just a view from a hill

Life sucks, doesn’t it?

You get nothing but bad luck.

No one appreciates you.

You don’t have enough money.

You’re bored and lonely.

Every day is another struggle, or another disappointment.

But if you try seeing your life as a view from a hill, you start to get more perspective on things.

Right now, you’re halfway up the hill.

If you only look up, you’ll only see all the super-lucky people who have found true love, won a fortune on the lottery, gained wonderful, fulfilling, well-paid jobs and are surrounded by loving families. They live in luxury houses and spend their holidays relaxing on sun-drenched Caribbean beaches.

And you know that no matter how hard you work, and how high you climb, you’ll never have everything they have.

It’s so unfair.

Why shouldn’t you be the lucky one for a change?

But you are.

Try looking down the hill.

There they are: the really unlucky people. They live in shanty towns and spend their lives searching for food on rubbish heaps. They’re dying alone in hospital, or trembling in a corner, dreading the sound of the key in the door which heralds their next beating.

No matter how bad your life gets, it’ll never be as bad as theirs.

But that’s no consolation, is it?

If you’re hungry, it’s no help to know that others are starving. You’re still hungry.

If you’re in pain, it doesn’t make you happier to know that someone else is in agony. It still hurts.

So if knowing that other people have worse lives than you doesn’t make you feel better, why should you let envy of other, ‘luckier’ people affect how you feel? Why let their luck poison your enjoyment of the pleasures you do have?

Make the most of the joy in your life

Celebrate the good luck you already have and strive for what you can achieve. And when times are hard, don’t forget the view from the hill.