How much impact does/should 'luck' have on our lives?

[RandBlade]

Does this guy have luck on his side? Is he lucky?

On the one hand at first glance yes, but on the other no.

There were many decisions taken there:

1: He stopped, had he not there would have been an accident.
2: it was snowy so dangerous conditions, should have been driving to those conditions.
3: he attempted to overtake a large vehicle by going onto the wrong side of the road.
4: The vehicle he attempted to overtake was stopping due to the oncoming large vehicle (which was itself having to go past a parked one from the look of it) - there would have been no near-miss had the vehicle the camera is in not attempted to overtake blindly in the snow.

Could go on but overall I'd say: no. Look at it in enough detail and it was not luck that determined the result but the decisions, skill and actions of the drivers plus the conditions of the road the drivers all knew they were driving in.

So after looking in detail simply prescribing it to luck is superficial.

It's still based on random chance, my dears. You're mistaking statistics with individual chance.

Of course it's still based on chance [again superficially only normally] - but you have control over the probabilities of those chances.