In our day to day lives, we often erroneously assume we have plot armor.

In fiction, "plot armor" is where the main hero survives through a series of highly improbable lucky breaks.

This is another example of post-hoc selection of a lottery ticket winner leading to an illusion of causality.

We only bother to tell stories that are interesting, and a story where the hero dies in the first chapter is not interesting.

That means that many fiction stories that we consume are ones where the main character has plot armor, setting our priors.

We are the hero of our own story.

But we're bit players in everyone else's.

Our implicit assumption that we are the hero combines with our priors to lead to a conclusion that we have plot armor.

But this is an illusion!