Unlock Your Fortune: How the Lucky 888 Can Transform Your Luck and Life

Let me tell you, the idea of a “lucky charm” always seemed a bit quaint to me—something for casino floors and souvenir shops. That was until I started digging into the cultural and psychological mechanics behind symbols like the number 888, and more surprisingly, until I played a video game that accidentally taught me a profound lesson about how we process collective trauma and, strangely enough, how we choose to shape our own fortune. The game is Bloober Team’s The Medium, and my experience with it became a bizarre case study in unlocking a mindset shift. You see, the developers at Bloober Team swore to me several times across multiple interviews that the game isn't at all inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic, which really strains credulity early on when so many of the loose notes you'll find refer to things like social distancing, lockdowns, and crackpot conspiracies around vaccines. The studio told me at Summer Game Fest that any allusions to the real-life pandemic were subconscious at best. I don't see how, but nonetheless, taking my own experience with the pandemic into this game heightened the intrigue. Our timeline didn't lead to mutated monsters, but I found it interesting to witness the Polish team grapple with a pandemic depicted as something like what I lived through—at least early on—set to the backdrop of its nation's Soviet era, exploring how communism would've led to different outcomes, even before you throw in the creatures made of multiple heads and many tentacles.

Here’s where my mind made the connection. The game presents a world where a historical, systemic ideology (communism) collides with a biological disaster, creating a specific, twisted reality. The characters are, in a sense, trapped by the “luck” of their circumstance—the geopolitical dice roll of being born in a certain place at a certain time. It’s the opposite of fortune. It got me thinking about the frameworks we inhabit. For years, I’d dismissed concepts like the Lucky 888 as mere superstition. In Chinese culture, 8 is supremely lucky because it sounds like the word for “prosperity” or “wealth.” Triple eights? That’s the jackpot of symbolic fortune, representing infinite abundance. I used to think adopting such a symbol was passive, maybe even naive. But what The Medium subconsciously mirrored was our human need to narrativize chaos, to impose a framework of meaning—even a numerical one—onto unpredictable events. The game’s developers might not have intentionally crafted a COVID allegory, but the themes leaked in because that trauma was the water we were all swimming in. Our minds seek patterns, lucky numbers, or explanatory narratives to cope. That’s the first step to transformation: acknowledging the framework you’re already using, even if it’s one of fear or uncertainty.

So, what’s the problem? The issue isn't whether 888 is magically lucky. It’s that most people approach luck as something external that happens to them—a random windfall or a cruel twist of fate, much like the pandemic was for so many. They see it as a single, monolithic force. In The Medium, the protagonist is reactive for much of the story, pushed by the horrors of her environment. The problem in our lives is similar: we often remain passive within our own narratives, waiting for a break instead of engineering one. We might buy a trinket with 888 on it, put it on a shelf, and hope. That’s not unlocking anything; that’s just decorating your prison. I realized I’d been doing a version of this, carrying the mental baggage of the pandemic’s isolation and anxiety like an unchangeable fact of my personal history, a piece of bad luck I was just stuck with.

The solution, then, is to actively Unlock Your Fortune: How the Lucky 888 Can Transform Your Luck and Life. It’s a process, not an incantation. First, you adopt the symbol not as a superstition, but as a cognitive anchor—a reminder. For me, I literally set 888 as a daily password prompt. Every time I typed it, it wasn’t a plea for money to fall from the sky. It was a trigger to ask myself: “What are three small actions I can take today to build prosperity?” Prosperity in health, in relationships, in skill, in opportunity. Three actions. Eight represents that cyclical, ongoing process. The second 8 is about mindset: consciously reframing challenges. In the game, the “monsters” are manifestations of trauma. In our lives, a setback isn’t just bad luck; it’s data. A failed project isn’t a curse; it’s 8,000 bytes of information on what not to do next time. You quantify the lesson. I started applying this after a content series I launched last year flopped, gaining only about 1,200 views total against an expected 15,000. Instead of labeling it a disaster, I broke it down: 80% of the drop-off happened in the first 30 seconds. The problem was the hook, not the topic. That’s actionable. The third 8 is about expansion and connection—the infinite loop. Luck, statistically, favors those in motion, those who connect ideas and people. The “luck” of Bloober Team’s game resonating with pandemic-weary players came from a shared, if subconscious, experience. I began to deliberately connect my work with others’, to collaborate, to put my ideas into more networks. Your “luck surface area” increases exponentially.

The ultimate revelation from this odd mix of horror-game analysis and numerology is this: fortune isn’t found; it’s constructed. The Lucky 888 is a blueprint. The first 8 is intentional action. The second is analytical reframing. The third is networked expansion. When the world feels as chaotic and dystopian as the one in The Medium—and let’s be honest, some days it really does—having a personal system to fall back on is everything. It turns you from a character buffeted by plot into the author of your own story. The game’s developers may have stumbled into a pandemic narrative, but in doing so, they highlighted our profound need to make sense of chaos. You can do that passively, or you can choose your own framework. I choose 888. Not because I believe the number itself holds power, but because the ritual of it reminds me to build my own luck, piece by intentional piece, every single day. That’s a transformation no monster, mutated or mundane, can take away from you.