On the fifth day of Chinese New Year in my family, eat dawn plings, for good luck but not visit family, it's bad luck,

It's a piece of extreme bad luck

Simple things like, don't put your bread on the table upside down because it brings bad luck.

But this is as nothing next to the monumental bad luck of encountering people who do all this to us while also being extremely skilled at pretending that they aren’t.

Well, not bad, not the bad luck.

If we find ourselves in a relationship, we will assiduously practice the arts of what psychologists call distance management. When the chance of reaching a truly happy state appears, we'll subtly discover ways to introduce a chasm. We'll have an argument, spoil a birthday, ruin a holiday. We'll find we have to do a lot of work for an upcoming exam or presentation, that our gang of friends needs us to be somewhere else, that we forgot to return the credit card or tax bill, that our appearance requires a lot of our attention or that we like to flirt with a stranger at a party who suddenly seems very attractive indeed. In both tiny and large ways, we'll know just how to lower the mood, scupper a bond and destroy trust. Perhaps not enough to end a relationship completely, but certainly enough to worry our partner sufficiently as to our solidity that we can be privately sure things will never truly fly. Friends may commiserate with us on our so-called bad luck. Psychologists will note our superlative skill at romantic sabotage. With this to sound a bit like us, compassion is required. We should reflect back on our pasts and wonder at the connection between our fractured bonds with parental figures and our disrupted adult attachments. We aren't like this because we're wicked, we've just been very badly hurt. Once we understand how our skill at independence was acquired, we'll be in a better position to see that it has in reality outlived its rationale. We may still feel immensely apprehensive at the prospect of contentment, but we may finally be able to admit that we are, first and foremost, acting out of fear. Rather than dismissing our partners, we may stick closer to a much more awkward truth – that we're tempted to draw away from them because we're immensely scared that they might finally be in a position to make us very happy – and that simply nothing so unutterably and boundlessly frightening has ever happened to us before.

Perversely, people didn't like to wish a fellow actor good luck because they thought it would invoke or bring about bad luck, so they decided to come up with a phrase that would be the opposite.

Bad luck [it] floats around

Some people believe that if you break a mirror, you will have seven years of bad luck.

While there's usually a certain amount of genetic risk for autoimmunity, to get an actual autoimmune disease, you also need a colossal case of bad luck on top of that.