There is a sense in which being alive at all is winning a sort of lottery. But it's a chance to play a game not of your choosing, and much of it isn't fun. Just consider infants, toddlers and young children separated from their parents and living in US government concentration camps right now. What sort of lottery did they win?

I can further say that I won other lotteries by pretty much pulling the best possible card from the metaphorical Deck of Life: "white, anglo-saxon, protestant heterosexual male born with no appreciable disabilities into a stable, unconditionally loving and ultimately intact upwardly mobile middle class family" is about as good as it gets, no? And yet ... I've endured the "unnatural" death of my mother, oldest brother, 2nd wife and adult son, the harms of fundamentalism and the difficulties of coming out of it, and a bunch of other unwanted drama, and my life does not resemble what I chose / wanted for myself in my youth, even adjusting for my illusions.

So, sure, I do my best to focus on the positives and let go of the negatives, and it's good for these things to be pointed out. And yet we must always strive to relieve suffering and improve the human condition. Going on about our privilege or the first world nature of many of our problems doesn't make them not problems. It puts them in a certain perspective, but pain is pain. We only know what we know and that is all we have to compare our lives to. Human suffering is, at bottom, impoverishment of freedom of choice, not what we are theoretically born to but what we can actually realize.

This is a fine piece by Prof Dawkins, but the irony is that the concept which he refers to pre-dates him by 2,500 years. Please see the Buddhist parable Chiggala Sutta: The Turtle and the Golden Yoke or sometimes known as The Hole [vipassana.com] which comments on the rarity of a human life

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Something to think about!