What a survival show can teach us about the role of luck in daily life
Sometimes you hook the fish, other times it hooks you
Lately I’ve been watching a survival reality show called Alone. Each season, ten contestants are dumped somewhere in the remote wilderness with a handful of gear. They may call for a rescue and be evacuated at any time they choose — the last person standing wins half a million dollars.
The show is different from other survival programs in that the contestants are truly isolated. They’re placed miles apart from one another so there’s no interaction. There are no camera crews — each player gets a bunch of camera equipment to document their own ordeals. The contests typically take place in the fall, with the onset of winter and subsequent disappearance of food sources putting pressure on players to leave. Each season the winner is usually on the brink of starvation and madness from the protracted isolation and hunger. It makes for grim but oddly compelling TV.
In Season 5 the show invited losing players from the previous seasons to give it another go. This made for an interesting experiment: would contestants’ performance in previous seasons predict their longevity in Season 5? There are a lot of reasons to assume this would be the case. Surviving in the wilderness for weeks at a time requires a great deal of training and skill — you have to know how to make fires, build shelters, patch up injuries, and kill, clean and cook wild game. You also have to know how to occupy your mind to stave off boredom and despair (you’d be surprised at how many people leave not due to hunger or medical issues, but simply because they miss their friends and families). Certain people are simply going to be better at these things than others. Some of the most enjoyable parts of the show, for instance, involve the hapless fools who freak out and call for rescue after one night, or less, in the wild. For some reason they tend to disproportionately be cops, military guys, and dudes who are really into guns.
So I made a plot of the ten Season 5 contestants, charting the duration of their stay in the wilderness against their duration in whichever previous season they were on. If past performance predicts future success, you’d expect the durations to kind of cluster along a diagonal line, showing some sort of correlation. But that’s not what we see.
There’s basically no relationship between the contestants’ two experiences — whether they had a long or short stay in a previous season has virtually no bearing on their performance in Season 5. While this is a very small sample of people observed in an unusual context, the figure says something to me about the oft overlooked role of chance and luck in human affairs.
We tend to want to see cause and effect in the world around us, to attribute our successes and failures to things under our control. The impulse is particularly strong in the media, where we have to fit the days events into a larger “narrative” about The Way Things Are.
In reality, chance and arbitrariness rule our lives. Across multiple domains, like CEO pay, professional sports, scientific breakthroughs, and life success overall, the difference between a good and bad outcomes often amount to just a roll of the dice.
Returning to the chart, consider the case of Carleigh. She was the first runner-up of Season 3, lasting 86 days in the Patagonian wilderness. She never tapped out — she had to be pulled from the game by the medical team because her BMI passed a dangerously low threshold (participants receive periodic medical checks to make sure they’re not doing “irreparable harm” to themselves). She was literally starving herself to death.
Season 3 Carleigh was a poster child for the things that are supposed to make you successful in life, combining a great degree of skill and knowledge with enough grit and determination to keep slogging on no matter how much pain she was in. She was the odds-on favorite to win when she returned in Season 5.
Instead, she was the very first one out. On day 5 she was pulling in a fish she had just caught when it slipped out of her grasp and somehow, freakishly, got the hook lodged deep in her hand. For 20 hours she tried to get the hook free — pulling at it with pliers, whacking it with an axe, attempting to push it through to the other side. Again, skill and grit. But it was to no avail. She suspects it got hooked around a tendon. In the end she had to call the medical team or risk doing permanent damage to her hand.
Shit happens! Sometimes you hook the fish, sometimes the fish hooks you. But it’s still hard for us — especially those of us who’ve achieved some degree of success in life — to acknowledge how much of our lives are governed by chance, luck and arbitrariness.
Speaking of good luck, remember Tuesday when I was hoping this would be the first week of the school year without any of my kids out sick? Here it is Friday and everyone is still in class or daycare, right where they’re supposed to be. May you have similar good fortune heading into the weekend.