Is luck important? Is our life primarily driven by chance? I'd say:
“Yes!”
Sinchen, keep that text of reasonable length!
While there are some correlations maybe sometimes going into the direction of causality for influence on happiness in out life, the biggest part is determined externally.
This has been even more extreme in the past. A poor son of a farmer had less possibilities than the son of a noble. Not even talking about the girls.
So, yes, there has been some kind of improvement regarding giving people equal chances, but let’s be realistic: One would have to master the art of ignorance to not acknowledge HUGE amounts of inequity everywhere. Much of your chances in life are predetermined by who you are, not by what you do/did.
This general observation isn’t invalidated by anecdotal counterexamples.
I very much doubt the American “forge your own destiny”-stuff. Statements like this are abused to blame people for “their unwillingness to take action in order to improve their situation” -- to call victims of bad circumstances guilty.
Often people unhappy with their unlucky lives are accused of being ungrateful “because it could be worse and other people have even worse fate.” True. In most cases it is easy to name selected people (or whole groups or even countries) with generally worse circumstances. Yeah! That’s really helpful! If you are tied to the wall of a dark dungeon cellar and rats are biting off your toes, you should be grateful to have a roof above your head!
I’ve seen injustice and inequity myself countless times; and I’m always on the loser’s side.
I’ve seen big assholes having success. Impostors. People who know jack shit about their job. People who get paid for not doing their job. And they get away with it. Even guys who should be in jail. But thanks to their luck their deeds never get noticed and they are never prosecuted.
You can try as hard as you want. Without good luck your life is gonna be