I’ve experienced roughly the same thing. I think of it like this: when I experience an unexpectedly good outcome, I immediately feel a feeling of gratitude. Normally when this happens it is due to another person’s actions (I’m given a gift or a promotion, or I’m pulled out of the way of a speeding bus, say), and as social creatures we pay attention to that and strongly associate the resultant feeling of gratitude with that person.
But it’s not the person that (directly) causes the feeling, it’s the circumstances. So when the feeling is caused by a good outcome that was not directly or intentionally caused by a person’s actions, our brain by habit or instinct seeks out a backup candidate: God, luck, etc.
I was at a lecture by Richard Dawkins a while back, and he specifically brought up the topic of gratitude as a human parallel for (I can’t remember the exact name he gave it, but wikipedia calls it Vacuum Activity). Just like a dog trying to bury a bone in the corner of the room. It also had to do with our inherent patter-matching nature, and the survival difference between making Type 1 and Type 2 mistakes (where if you falsely believe a tiger is about to pounce you, you pay a small energy cost from freaking out and running away; but if you falsely think it’s just the wind, you die).
I’ve experienced roughly the same thing. I think of it like this: when I experience an unexpectedly good outcome, I immediately feel a feeling of gratitude. Normally when this happens it is due to another person’s actions (I’m given a gift or a promotion, or I’m pulled out of the way of a speeding bus, say), and as social creatures we pay attention to that and strongly associate the resultant feeling of gratitude with that person.
But it’s not the person that (directly) causes the feeling, it’s the circumstances. So when the feeling is caused by a good outcome that was not directly or intentionally caused by a person’s actions, our brain by habit or instinct seeks out a backup candidate: God, luck, etc.
I was at a lecture by Richard Dawkins a while back, and he specifically brought up the topic of gratitude as a human parallel for (I can’t remember the exact name he gave it, but wikipedia calls it Vacuum Activity). Just like a dog trying to bury a bone in the corner of the room. It also had to do with our inherent patter-matching nature, and the survival difference between making Type 1 and Type 2 mistakes (where if you falsely believe a tiger is about to pounce you, you pay a small energy cost from freaking out and running away; but if you falsely think it’s just the wind, you die).