Few ideas have endured across cultures quite like karma. Rooted in Hindu philosophy over two thousand years ago, it carried a simple promise: do good, and good will come back to you. Today, that same idea lives on in everyday language, "what goes around comes around." It is a comforting idea, but also a mystical one, as if the universe keeps score. And yet, what if it does not have to be mystical at all, what if the scorekeeper is not the universe, but mathematics?

The law of large numbers is one of the most fundamental results in probability theory. It states that as the number of trials of a random experiment increases, the observed average will converge toward the expected value. Flip a coin ten times and you might get seven heads. Flip it ten thousand times and the result will be very close to fifty percent. However, this only holds under three important assumptions: each trial must be independent, each trial must be identically distributed, and the outcomes must be bounded, meaning they cannot grow infinitely large. The key insight is that individual outcomes remain unpredictable, but given these conditions, patterns become inevitable at scale.

To apply the law of large numbers to human behaviour, we need to map its assumptions onto reality. Think of each interaction with a person as a trial. The way you treat that person is the input, and how they treat you in return is the outcome. Now consider the underlying probability: if you consistently treat people well, it seems reasonable to believe that any given person is more likely than not to treat you well in return. Not certain, but probable, say a little better than fifty percent. This is the expected value of your distribution. For the law of large numbers to hold, three assumptions must be satisfied. The outcomes must be bounded, meaning no single interaction can have an infinite impact on your life. The interactions must be identically distributed, meaning the same underlying probability applies across all of them. And they must be sufficiently independent, meaning the outcome of one interaction does not heavily determine the next. If these assumptions hold, the law tells us that over a lifetime of interactions, the average of what you receive will converge toward that expected value, toward the good that you consistently put out.

The assumptions of the law of large numbers are not just mathematical requirements, they are also practical ones. Each one tells us something about how to live if we want the pattern to emerge. Boundedness reminds us not to make overly drastic decisions, no single interaction or choice should carry infinite weight in your life. Identical distribution asks you to stay consistent, treat people the same way regardless of the context, because it is your underlying behaviour that sets the expected value. And independence asks you to keep meeting new people, to step outside your usual circles and comfort zone, because the more varied and loosely connected your interactions are, the more the law can do its work. In short, be consistent, stay open, and do not let any single outcome define you. Relax, and let the numbers play out.

This is what I believe karma actually is: not a cosmic ledger, but the law of large numbers in practice. The universe does not keep score, but mathematics does not need to. If the assumptions hold, the outcome is the same. I believe that most people, when treated well, are more likely than not to treat you well in return. If that belief is true, the expected value is above fifty percent, and across a lifetime of interactions, the law guarantees that the average converges. What feels like cosmic justice is simply statistics at scale. The comforting part is that you do not need to believe in anything supernatural to trust the process. You only need to believe in the math, and perhaps, in people.

Of course, none of this means that every good deed will be rewarded, or that the math will always work in your favour. The law of large numbers offers no guarantees for individual cases, and neither does karma. Good people sometimes get unlucky, and that is a reality no theorem can undo. But that was never the point. The law does not promise a perfect outcome, it promises a tendency. And perhaps that is enough, not a guarantee, but a quiet confidence that if you stay consistent, stay open, and keep the assumptions intact, the pattern you build will eventually speak for itself.