Feeling Worthless? Here’s Why the Odds of You Existing Are the Most Beautiful Miracle
On the days when you hate yourself and you feel like a cosmic mistake, or like someone else got your seat in life and you’re just the leftover breath, I want to tell you something: you’re the rarest thing that has absolutely ever happened.
I don’t mean that as comfort and fluffy, go-get-em-kinda way, I mean it mathematically and astronomically, completely undeniably.
The Odds of You Existing Are Almost Zero
You, sitting there reading this, with your laugh that’s a little too loud and your scars that liter your knees, and that one birthmark only you know about. The exact arrangement of molecules that make you feel music the way you do, or flinch when someone raises their voice.
You’re so statistically improbable that it’s truly absurd.
Biologists and mathematicians have tried to calculate the odds of you being born, and depending on how deep they go, the numbers become almost incomprehensible. One famous estimate by Dr. Ali Binazir puts the odds of you (exactly as you are!) at 1 in 10^2,685,000.
For some sort of reference: the number of atoms in the known universe is around 10^80.
That’s like flipping a coin and getting heads 2 million times in a row and every star aligning, every time, without fail, forever. That’s you.
You didn’t just beat the odds to be born, you were physically carried here to this moment. You were passed like a torch, like a beautiful and enchanting poem told between two lovers for thousands of years.
Think about it…every single one of your ancestors had to do one very specific thing: find someone, fall in love (or at least lust), and create a child who lived long enough to do the same. Go back just 10 generations (that’s about 300 years) and you have over 1,000 direct ancestors who had to survive disease, famine, war, childbirth, heartbreak, plague, and weather they couldn’t predict.
They all had to choose to try, to love, and to keep going when the world knocked them on their asses and it felt like there was nothing they could do about it.
When you go back far enough, those aren’t just people. They’re refugees and hunters and healers and myth-keepers.
They’re women who hid pregnancies under empire and men who sang lullabies on battlefields.
They’re people who should have died, but didn’t, in a world determined to snuff out the brightest of flames.
All of them said (consciously or not): “let there be you.”
You Are the Child of Miracles and Mistakes
You’re not here because everyone did everything right. You’re actually here because people kept going, even when they did everything absolutely and horribly wrong. You’re here because someone forgave someone else, or because someone looked up in the middle of despair and said, “maybe tomorrow will be my day.”
You’re the grandchild of grief, the offspring of second chances, the bloodline of people who lost everything and still found some way to light a fire.
You don’t have to be perfect, you’re literally made from people who weren’t.
And somehow, it still led to you.
Let’s say you’re standing on the edge of the Earth, and every person who could’ve been born (every genetic combination that never was) is a grain of sand. Now imagine the wind lifts exactly one of those grains, and not just any grain, but you.
Not just a random human, not just someone alive in this century, I’m talking about you with your exact memories, your crooked smile, and your awkward handwriting. That truly special face you make when you look at someone you love without knowing they're looking back.
You’re not a coincidence, you’re a cosmic lottery ticket someone kept safe for 4 billion years.
There will absolutely be days when you won’t feel beautiful and the mirror lies to you, and your thoughts turn cruel enough to lash out at yourself and wonder, “why are you even here?”
And I hope you remember this on those inevitable days: you’re here because love repeated itself.
Because a thousand men reached for a thousand women in the dark, a hundred mothers survived childbirth when they shouldn’t have, because your great-grandparents once danced, once cried, once made tea for each other in silence when things got hard.
You’re here because somewhere out there, in some point in time people prayed, or screamed, or made promises to each other under stars.
You’re a beautiful continuation of every spark that survived the night.
Science says your body is made of atoms that once lived in stars, that the calcium in your bones was born in supernovas. I’ve gone into this in probably dozens of my posts by now because I think it’s one of the most breath-taking facts we overlook on a daily basis.
But isn’t it just as magnificent that you were also made from love letters and the blush of strangers in springtime sneaking glances at each other when they think the other isn’t watching?
What about from hands that touched in candlelight before electricity was even born?
You’re stardust that remembers the ephemeral moments we think vanish in the hands of time.
Let’s Do the Math, Because You Know Me
If just one of your ancestors had missed their moment, had taken a different road, a different train, or a different breath, you might not be here at all.
If one egg had been released on a different day or one ancestor had married someone else, or one migration had stalled in a storm, who you are might’ve never been. The math says: you’re a miracle of impossible odds stacked upon impossible odds, wrapped in skin and carrying a name. So please, never hate yourself for existing. You’re too rare to waste.
You might not look like your ancestors or even speak their language or know their names, but your heartbeat carries their rhythm. You’re a continuation of the ones who planted seeds they never got to see grow, but they did it anyway, with hope in their hearts.
The mothers who didn’t get the chance to grow old and the fathers who carried secrets they never spoke aloud you carry around in your very cells. The children lost too soon, whose lineage lived on through siblings you embody.
You’re a story that didn’t end when it was supposed to. And the fact that you’re here reading this right now means the story still matters.
Some days you’ll feel too much while other days you’ll feel like nothing at all.
On those days…when your skin feels unfamiliar, you look in the mirror and don’t recognize the shape of your softness or your scars, remember this: the ocean never apologizes for how wide it is and the stars never shrink themselves to fit your ceiling.
Neither should you.
You weren’t made to be small, you were made to be specific and unlike anything else in the universe. Even your self-doubt is proof you’re alive.
You Were Chosen by the Universe’s Chaos and Chemistry
There were millions of other eggs, billions of other sperm, trillions of potential timelines, and somehow, they all missed.
Except you. You, one impossibly specific spark, were chosen by a blend of chaos and chemistry so delicate it can’t be replicated.
You’re this soul in this century in this strange, beautiful body. And no one else will ever be.
Some days you’ll be tired of surviving, of trying to see the bright side, and of pretending that wonder is enough to pay the bills or quiet the ache in your soul, and you really don’t have to be grateful all the time.
But you get to stay.
You get to try again and eat something warm, maybe even sit in the sun and say “I don’t know what I’m doing” and mean it without any shame. You get to cry at poems, and kiss someone unexpected, and grow out of versions of yourself you swore you’d always be.
You don’t owe the universe joy, but it gifted you breath anyway.
In a world filled with entropy and decay and loss, you made it. Despite the wars, the plagues, the heartbreaks and heartbreakers.
Despite the chemical accidents and cosmic collisions, and the family trauma and the late-night panic attacks.
You. Are. Here.
Breathing, reading, wondering if you’re enough, searching for the answer out there on the internet so that you can ease some of that ache in your chest before taking your next breath.
You are.
You don’t have to do anything exceptional to earn your place here, you don’t have to prove you’re worthy of oxygen or hugs or hope.
You already are. You’re the rarest version of existence the universe has ever produced.
And that’s enough.
