What are the chances?

Literally what are the chances we are who we are?

Here’s an attempt at calculating my existence, privilege and choices to contextualize being one tiny person on this massive planet, and specifically what it means to be me.

Existence

• To start off, it’s been said the chances that we are born into existence is 1 in 400 trillion
• Americans are 4.27% of the world population
  • Californians make up 12% of the US population (or 0.51% of the world population)

Privilege

• College graduates are a mere 6.7% of the world population
  • UCBerkeley is ranked 27th in the Top University rankings; there are 16,000 colleges worldwide so that is the top 1.7% of colleges worldwide. (Thus the likelihood of having attended on of the top 27 universities is 0.11%)
• An income of $32,400 per year would allow someone to be among the top 1% of income earners in the world
  • Note: we often think of income in terms of US, but this really brought perspective
• To have traveled to 40 countries by age 22, one Quora estimate says is 1 in 5,900 (less than 0.02% likelihood)
  • I haven’t been to that many countries, but I’ve traveled more than my fare CO₂ share
•  To even be writing this on a Mac computer right now, I’m in a narrow 1.33% of people worldwide with a Mac (100 million people)

“Choices”

• Vegans are between 7.5-13.5% of the world population (and growing!)
• Atheists are about 7% of the world population (most of whom reside in China)

Takeaways

This isn’t to say I’m super special, especially because I only really “chose” two of the statistics (which are also likely correlated if not caused by a specific type of education). Moreover, these calculations further instilled the imperative I feel to use my advantages to benefit the world, aka the majority of people on the flip-side of all of these statistics. I plan to be more grateful to live in the beautiful state of California. I am also going to donate more money to global causes and use my education to solve global issues. I also vow to fly less and continue to purchase vegan products so that they may become more accessible.