An Open Letter to graduating High School students

Are you rich? Do you come from a family that doesn’t worry about paying their bills? Do you take regular vacations with your family? Do you live with both your mom and your dad? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then perhaps this letter is not for you. On the other hand, if you answered no to any of those questions, or are simply curious, I’d like you to pause for a moment and consider how you and your immediate family got in your current situation. I’m not saying you’re in a bad place. But if you think your life could be better, consider the series of actions or inactions caused by your elders that put you here. Take a moment to really think about it. Specifically, what could your grandparents have done differently that would have improved your parents lives and subsequently improved your life? Remember, you have 4 biological grandparents. When you’re done, come back and continue reading this.

Done? Good. Now if you haven’t already done it, I’d like you to imagine that you could write a letter to any of your grandparents and that that letter could magically be delivered back in time to be read by that person when they were the age you are now. Once you’ve done that, consider how different, or how much better off you’d be right now if they did what you asked of them in your letter.

Ok, let’s put that aside for a minute and speak about how you got here.

Not your economic or social situation like before. But rather how you physically came to exist.

Let’s take a moment to review exactly how you or any human gets started. No, this is not going to be instructional, as the Internet appears to have been created primarily to provide just such instructional videos. But rather this is a re-hash of what you were taught, or should have been taught in grade school. Humans are conceived by a single sperm entering a single egg and fertilizing it. For most of us, that’s where that thought ends. But what you don’t consider is this, how did that particular sperm out swim all the others? How did that particular egg get there in the first place? What about all the other sperms and eggs?

Let’s begin with the egg. Women are born with all the eggs they will ever have. They do not make them, they are born with them. Think about that for a moment. If women do not make them, then where did they come from? From your maternal grandmother that’s where. Kinda creepy but true. From the time of menstruation women lose about 1 egg every cycle. Usually about a month or so. So this means that the particular egg that became you was only in place for a few weeks at most. There are many things that can throw this off. Disease, poor diet, excessive exercise, etc. All things that would have resulted in a different egg being used at the time of conception. It may be obvious, but it’s worth stating that a different egg does NOT result in you being you. It would result in you being your sibling. Let’s also consider what could have happened before your mother was even born. If your maternal grandmother had a different diet, either better OR worse, if the circumstances of her pregnancy with your mother had been different at all, that would have affected the characteristics of each particular egg passed down to your mother. So not only did that particular egg have to be your egg, it had to have the right characteristics to be fertilized. Fertilized by that particular sperm in fact.

Now let’s take a look at your dad. His part of the bargain, the sperm, was probably made the day before conception. That means that pretty much anything could have affected it. What he ate, how he dressed, boxers or briefs, whether or not he got in a fight, ouch! Any of those could change the characteristics of the sperm he produced. Not only that, at the moment that those sperm began their particular journey, there were over one billion of them. Only one of which was you. So, what happens next? Well they have to swim towards the egg. Now this is just like any other obstacle course in that there are roadblocks and hazards along the way. There are deposits of mucus and other fluids that sometimes help and sometimes hinder the journey. There is PH to contend with. Is the environment acidic or not? That can be affected by diet and other things. There is also gravity involved. What position are they in? What happens if they move differently than they did?

Now let’s not forget time. If the journey started before or after it should have, then that means the initial positions of the sperms have changed. So, if someone delayed either your mother or your father or both by any means at all, the odds of that sperm that became you ever reaching its destination are significantly changed. And don’t forget, any other sperm is not you! It is your brother or sister!

Remember that old story about the time traveler who goes back in the past and accidentally kills his grandfather and thus is not born? Well that’s completely unnecessary. All he would have to have done is delay your mother or your father by a minute or so, or change their diet, or pretty much do anything and the odds of him being born almost vanish completely!

The point I am making here is that in order for you to have been conceived at all, everything that happened before that point had to have happened exactly as it did. This is a very important point with profound philosophical implications. A point almost everyone overlooks completely all the time.

So, now that we have established that mom and dad had to do the deed exactly as they did for you to be here, guess what? The same applies for their mom and dad. Hey! Grandpa gets kicked in the crotch on his way home to grandma and poof! Your mom becomes your Aunt and you don’t exist.

Now consider this; you have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and sixteen great-great-grandparents. There’s a formula for this. The number of ancestors you have is two to the Nth power. Where N is the number of generations you go back. So let’s consider the last 100 years. You probably knew a grandparent who was alive in 1921, so it’s not too abstract. Anyway, assuming that a generation is 20 years, that’s 5 generations ago. Using our formula that means that the act of conception discussed above had to happen EXACTLY as it did sixteen times between the thirty two people involved. If one of your great-great-great grandparents was delayed by even a single second, no you. And the further back you go, the more things had to happen as they did.

Mind you, this is not a matter of opinion. It is not some abstract concept. It is a cold hard fact.

Ok, I figure by this time your eyes are starting to glass over and you’re wondering what all this has to do with you. Fair question. You’re here, what do you care how that happened? Well, consider how many things happen in the world around you that are aimed at undoing things that happened in the past. Well, assuming you could do that, which you cannot, would you want to? I don’t think so.

At this point I would like to acknowledge that the past is filled with unimaginably horrible events that, if it were possible, we all would wish they never happened. But they did. And you personally needed them to happen so you could exist and wish they didn’t.

Now, back to that letter you wrote. Knowing what you know now, if you actually could send such a letter, would you?

We all started our lives in different places with different advantages and disadvantages. It’s really easy, and in fact sometimes even encouraged to imagine what your life would be like if your parents were better off. But you know what your life would be like? Non-existent.

Instead of dwelling on the less than perfect start you may have had in life, I’d like to suggest two alternative points of view. First, I’d like you to realize that you have already won a Lottery with mind numbing odds. Statistically, you shouldn’t exist, but here you are. You are not unlucky. You are lucky beyond anyone’s wildest dreams to be given this incredible gift of life.
The next, and most important point is this. You know that letter you were going to send to your grandparents? Make believe one of your future grandchildren sent it to you.
You have no control, and you do not want control over what happened in the past. But you have almost complete control over what happens in the future.
Any actions or inactions you do today, will undoubtedly affect literally thousands of people just like you who have yet to be born.

Time has only one direction, forward. It’s ok to look back and know your past. But don’t carry it around like a weight. Accept it and move on. Now that you know what a rare chance you have, you will soon realize how tragic it would be to waste it.