There’s a phenomenon in the world known as optimism bias. If a person buys a lottery ticket, he’ll naturally be biased to feel that there’s a certain possibility that he’ll win. And if he didn’t buy the ticket he wouldn’t have that same feeling. If 100 people are given lottery tickets and 100 people aren’t and they ask the two groups to exchange, almost invariably no one will exchange one with the other. Because each person who has the lottery ticket feels maybe this is a winning ticket, maybe it will win. And each person who doesn’t have the ticket isn’t going to take a hard-earned dollar and pay for it. Optimism bias is a certain natural tendency of feeling maybe, you never know, things work out.
Many people have that sort of attitude in life. Listen, somehow things work out. In the end things turn out okay, and it’s going to be good. While that’s a very good attitude towards life and a very good optimism to have, it has nothing to do with bitachon (trust).
