On June 15, 1905, Clara Magdalen Jansen killed all four of her children, Mary Claire, Frederick, John, and Theodore, in a little farmhouse in Jamestown, Wisconsin. She cleaned their bodies up, tucked them into bed, then took her own life. Her husband, Paul, came home from work to find his entire family under the covers of their little beds, dead, in what must have been one of the most horrific and traumatic experiences a human being can suffer.

There is a concept in philosophy known as amor fati, or love of one’s fate. We must accept that our lives are the culmination of everything that came before us. You may not know the names of all eight of your great-grandparents off the top of your head, but when you look in the mirror, you are looking at generational composites of their eyes, their noses, their lips, an altered but recognizable etching from a forgotten past.

When we meet someone new, we can be certain of one fact: none of their direct ancestors died before having children. It’s a cliché, but true, to say that you wouldn’t exist if your parents had not met in just the same, exact way. Even if the timing had been slightly different, a different person would have been born.

But that’s also true for your grandparents, and your great-grandparents, and your great-great-grandparents, stretching back millennia. Your life depends on the courting of countless people in the Middle Ages, the survival of your distant Ice Age ancestors against the stalking whims of a saber-toothed tiger, and, if you go back even further, the mating preferences of chimpanzees more than 6 million years ago.

Trace the human lineage back hundreds of millions of years and all our fates hinge on a single wormlike creature that, thankfully for us, avoided being squished. If those precise chains of creatures and couples hadn’t survived, lived, and loved just the way that they did, other people might exist, but you wouldn’t. We are the surviving barbs of a chain-link past, and if that past had been even marginally different, we would not be here.

The Paul who came home to that little farmhouse in Wisconsin was my great-grandfather, Paul F. Klaas. My middle name is Paul, a family name enshrined by him. I’m not related to his first wife, Clara, because she tragically severed her branch of the family tree just over a century ago. Paul got remarried, to my great-grandmother.

When I was twenty years old, my dad sat me down, showed me a 1905 newspaper clipping with the headline “Terrible Act of Insane Woman,” and revealed the most disturbing chapter in our family’s modern history. He showed me a photo of that Klaas family gravestone in Wisconsin, all the little kids on one side, Clara on the other, their deaths listed on the same date. It shocked me. But what shocked me even more was the realization that if Clara hadn’t killed herself and murdered her children, I wouldn’t exist. My life was only made possible by a gruesome mass murder. Those four innocent children died, and now I am alive, and you are reading my thoughts.

Amor fati means accepting that truth, even embracing it, recognizing that we are the offshoots of a sometimes wonderful, sometimes deeply flawed past, and that the triumphs and the tragedies of the lives that came before us are the reason we’re here. We owe our existences to kindness and cruelty, good and evil, love and hate. It can’t be otherwise because, if it were, we would not be us.

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones,” Richard Dawkins once observed. “Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.” These are the limitless possible futures, full of possible people, that Dawkins called “unborn ghosts.”

Their ranks are infinite; we are finite. With the tiniest adjustments, different people would be born, leading different lives, in a different world. Our existence is bewilderingly fragile, built upon the shakiest of foundations.

Why do we pretend otherwise? These basic truths about the fragility of our existence defy our most deeply held intuitions about how the world works. We instinctively believe that big events have big, straightforward causes, not small, accidental ones. As a social scientist, that’s what I was taught to search for: the X that causes Y.

I am a (disillusioned) social scientist. Disillusioned because I’ve long had a nagging feeling that the world doesn’t work the way that we pretend it does. The more I grappled with the complexity of reality, the more I suspected that we have all been living a comforting lie, from the stories we tell about ourselves to the myths we use to explain history and social change. I began to wonder whether the history of humanity is just an endless, but futile, struggle to impose order, certainty, and rationality onto a world defined by disorder, chance, and chaos.

But I also began to flirt with an alluring thought: that we could find new meaning in that chaos, learning to celebrate a messy, uncertain reality, by accepting that we, and everything around us, are all just flukes, spit out by a universe that can’t be tamed.

Such intellectual heresy ran against everything I had been taught, from Sunday school to grad school. Everything happens for a reason; you just need to find out what it is. If you want to understand social change, just read more history books and social science papers. To learn the story of our species and how we came to be us, dive into some biology and familiarize yourself with Darwin. To grapple with the unknowable mysteries of life, spend time with the titans of philosophy, or if you’re a believer, turn to religion. And if you want to understand the intricate mechanisms of the universe, learn physics.

But what if such enduring human mysteries are all part of the same big question?

Specifically, it’s the biggest puzzle humanity must grapple with: Why do things happen? The more I read, year after year, the more I realized that there are no ready-made solutions to that enormous puzzle just waiting to be plucked from political science theories, philosophy tomes, economic equations, evolutionary biology studies, geology research, anthropology articles, physics proofs, psychology experiments, or neuroscience lectures.

Instead, I began to recognize that each of these disparate realms of human knowledge offers a piece that, when combined, can help us get closer to solving this bewildering puzzle. The challenge of my new book, Fluke, is to try to join many of those pieces together, to yield a new, coherent picture that reframes our sense of who we are and how our world works.

When enough puzzle pieces snap together, a fresh image emerges. As we see it come into focus, there’s hope that we can replace the comforting lies we tell ourselves with something that approaches a more accurate truth, even if it means that we must flip our entire, deeply ingrained worldview on its head.

A fair warning: some of you may find that flip disorienting. But we already live in disorienting times—of conspiratorial politics and pandemics, economic shocks, climate change, and fresh society-bending magic, produced by the wizardry of artificial intelligence. In a world of rapid change, many of us feel lost in a sea of uncertainty. But when lost at sea, clinging to comforting lies will only help us sink. The best life raft may just be the truth.

We live in a more interesting and complex world than we are led to believe. If we gaze a little closer, then the storybook reality of neat, tidy connections might just give way to a reality defined much more by chance and chaos, an arbitrarily intertwined world in which every moment, no matter how small, can count.

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Adapted from Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters by Brian Klaas. Copyright © 2024. Available from Simon & Schuster.

How do rank, power, status, and physical health fit together? How can we be sure that those factors are the cause of biological changes in our physical well-being rather than coincidence?

Those are two of the questions that Professor Sir Michael Marmot of University College London has dedicated much of his life to answering. In most observational studies (studies that look at data from the real world rather than through a carefully controlled experiment in a lab), it’s difficult to disentangle cause and effect. If you just compared, say, CEOs to custodians, you’d certainly find big differences in health outcomes. But the two groups have so many other differences that any relationships you found between status and health could’ve been caused by hundreds of different variables: education, childhood experience, nutrition, you name it. It would be impossible to show that status, or climbing the hierarchy, had altered anyone’s biology.

Whenever Marmot suggested power and health were related, most people chalked it up to one of two things: stress or money. Either people who were powerful would have worse health outcomes because they were stressed, or they’d have better health outcomes because they were rich.

In 1985, Marmot decided to test those hypotheses. He launched the Whitehall II Study to examine health inequalities, with a special emphasis on hierarchy and status. Whitehall is the name of a road in the Westminster area of London, where many of the British government’s offices are located. The study set out to track 10,308 British civil servants over their careers in government. Because the comparisons were being made between people in the same profession and often among people who started at the same rank, Marmot could neutralize a lot of the other confounding variables that might get in the way of figuring out which effects were caused by rank and hierarchy and which weren’t. It compared apples to apples much more than previous studies.

Moreover, because the same people were being measured over time, Marmot was able to see how relative status changes affected health in the same individuals. “At the entry to the study,” Marmot tells me, “you take people of a certain seniority level and look at the trajectory of that cohort. Where would the average be for that group ten years later? And then you look at whether those people were above or below that average—in other words, had they done better than the average or worse?” With that method, Marmot’s team could track a group of people who entered the civil service at the same time, even at the same rank, and then see how their health outcomes diverged over time in relation to their promotions. Plus, because the band of civil service salaries is narrower than what you get in the private sector, money wouldn’t be as much of a factor. Participants were surveyed initially in 1985, and every two to five years ever since.

In the data, Marmot discovered a crude but clear relationship: the higher up the hierarchy you climbed, the lower your mortality. Marmot calls this the Status Syndrome. Those in the lowest strata who stayed there had triple the mortality of those who ascended to the higher echelons of power. This was, at first glance, perplexing, because it went against the assumed relationship between higher-stress jobs and health. “People said, ‘Well, stress can’t be important,’” Marmot tells me. “Surely high grades are under more stress than low grades—you know, if you’ve got deadlines and ministers calling on you all the time. And I thought, ‘Yeah, higher-ranked people are under more stress.’” But Marmot got a stroke of insight when he began looking at questions that focused less on rank and more on control—the ability to shape events in the workplace. “I realized it’s not just the pressure,” Marmot says. “It’s the combination of high demand and low control. And I realized: that explains everything in our data.”

The more Marmot and his team of researchers sliced and diced the data, the clearer this relationship was. People who faced immense pressure at work (what Marmot calls demand) were fine so long as they also felt a high degree of control. But for people who felt under a lot of pressure and didn’t feel that they were in the driver’s seat (or able to at least move the steering wheel from time to time), their health outcomes were much worse. We don’t need to be dictators, but we do need to feel that we have a say over decisions within our professional lives.

Marmot had found that the conventional wisdom—that more power would cause bad health outcomes because of added stress—is wrong. The reason it’s wrong, however, is surprising. It turns out that there’s quite a big gap between what we often call stress and what actually stresses our bodies in harmful ways.

Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky has found—in studying both baboons and humans—that stress is a crucial tool in survival. When our bodies are functioning properly, stress causes a series of biological changes that help us. Again, let’s think back to our Stone Age ancestors. Say you’re out for your morning walk, hoping to do a bit of hunting and a dash of gathering before breakfast, when, suddenly, a saber-toothed tiger comes over a ridge and bares its fangs in your general direction. Both you and the tiger have a stress-induced reaction. The body pauses its normal digestion, redirecting energy from producing long-term fat stores and injecting it into the bloodstream right away. This makes sense. You and the tiger are both going to need extra energy for what’s about to happen. Because digestion is paused, saliva production slows (which, as Sapolsky notes, explains why we get dry mouth when we’re nervous).

Long-term processes that are necessary for good health, such as growth and tissue repair, are put on hold, too. This is a welcome bit of bodily triage, since you might not have any tissues left to repair if the saber-toothed tiger catches you. The hypothalamus simultaneously tells the pituitary glands to spring to action. The sympathetic nervous system kicks into high gear, releasing hormones that raise your heart rate and blood pressure. Adrenaline floods into your bloodstream. If everything works the right way, it gives you a better chance at survival. We know this in colloquial terms as the fight-or-flight response.* Stress is designed to help save us.

But just as so much else in our modern lives has diverged from our Stone Age evolutionary design, so, too, has the stress response. Anyone who fears public speaking and has gotten in front of a crowd to deliver an address has felt something similar to what our ancestors felt in the presence of a predator—a classic stress response. It’s perfectly normal and isn’t usually a big deal. But the problem, as both Marmot and Sapolsky argue, is that our fight-or-flight stress response has, in some workplaces or lifestyles, become a chronic condition rather than a short-term emergency one. The grind of certain jobs, rather than an exceptional break-the-glass moment in the face of a deadly predator, puts us into stress mode. What should only be acute stress is now, for too many of us, routine.

One reason why this relationship is so difficult to understand is because modern society uses the word stress to refer to things that are intense, but not biologically stressful. Plenty of high-powered jobs are intense (or have “high demand” as Marmot would say) but aren’t stressful because we enjoy them immensely and are able to shape their outcomes (by having “high control”). The CEO who is watching his or her start-up take off might say that their meteoric rise is “stressful” when it’s not remotely stressful in physiological terms. It’s exhilarating and wonderful. Intense, hard work doesn’t inhibit normal health processes the same ways that biological stress does. Because we conflate the two in our daily speech, we often misattribute to stress what is actually passion or intensity.

According to Marmot’s research, however, you do get a harmful biological stress response if you hold a low-status position. But the same effect also exists for high-status positions that combine high demand with low control. A mistreated custodian is always likely to face adverse health consequences from lack of control, but a CEO can, too, in certain circumstances. So how does this manifest in the real world? Unfortunately (even though it would make good reality TV) we can’t answer that question with experiments that permanently swap CEOs and custodians to see what happens.

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Excerpted from Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us by Brian Klaas. Excerpted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © 2021 by Brian Klaas.