Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause. — Voltaire

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

Author: Voltaire

Insight: We live in a world obsessed with luck. Someone "gets lucky" with a job offer, a parking spot, a random text from an old friend. But Voltaire's point cuts through that comfortable story: there's no such thing as pure chance. That job offer came because you built skills over years. The parking spot opened because someone left at that exact moment for their own reasons. Even a "random" text followed from past relationship patterns and habits. This matters because treating things as mere luck can make us passive. If life is just chance, why try? But if everything has causes—some visible, some hidden—suddenly you have agency. Your current situation isn't random. It flows from choices you made, habits you built, people you know, effort you invested. That's both more demanding and more hopeful than luck ever is. The tricky part is that we can't always trace the full chain of causes. Life is too complex for that. So Voltaire's insight isn't that we can predict everything—it's that randomness is an illusion we use when we're too lazy to look deeper. The real question isn't whether luck exists. It's whether you're going to treat your life as something that happens to you, or something you're actually causing.

Source: Philosophical Dictionary, Chance