When I was younger and first started becoming interested in philosophy and general questions about the world, I was met with a pretty streamlined view from the media and pop culture of why things happen: ‘it’s the universe’s plan’. ‘It’s God’s plan’. ‘Everything happens for a reason’. ‘Everything will work out fine.’ ‘What goes around comes back around’. ‘What is meant to be will be’. Stuff like that. It’s cliché and you hear it everywhere.
For the longest time I relied on believing all of these things in a bid to essentially get me through life. If something bad happened, I could always tell myself it was meant to happen for the best, because something better was lined up for me. If someone I loved ever hurt me, I could always just tell myself that karma would deal with that person and I will get my own back. If I didn’t get into the Uni I wanted, I could always tell myself that it’s because I was just never meant to end up there and that I was better fit at whatever Uni I eventually did end up going to.
As time passed, and more things started happening to me, and more things started happening around me in the world, I really just took a step back and revelled in how much bullshit everything I initially believed in actually was. All these phrases that we’re told all have one thing in common: that justice will always be served in some sense or another, no matter the circumstance, and that it’s to help us and work in our favour.
For example, if I get into a car accident and lose a leg, according to what we’re often told, this was meant to happen because it was the universe’s plan, and justice is served because I will somehow benefit from losing this leg - let’s say I become a motivational speaker about how much life should be cherished and I profit from it and this is something I only came to experience from losing a leg. This was my destiny, this was the fate that was already written for me.
I understand the point: comfort. People find comfort in knowing that something awful happened because it was for the best. You were meant to be ambushed and mugged in that dark alleyway on your way home from work because later on it taught you to appreciate your own life more than your material belongings. You were meant to be rejected from your dream job because ‘rejection is redirection’ and no, it wasn’t because you just didn’t work hard enough, or because there were other candidates that were a lot stronger than you.
I feel as though this really resonates with religion, too. I, myself, am not religious at all - I identify as agnostic for many reasons like this. A majority of my friends are religious though, and I often find them using their religion and belief in God as their crux for justification for many events and circumstances.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this comfort is all just a type of incentive to prevent us from going insane. Weirdly, I feel as though this is obvious. Isn’t it obvious that these comfort quotes and phrases and religion were created to prevent us from going insane? If we didn’t have beliefs and faith in something bigger than us, surely we would ‘go off the rails’ simply because nothing had a bigger meaning attached to it?
I don’t know why I just can’t bring myself to find comfort in any of it. I just don’t believe everything happens for a reason, I believe that things happen because things are just a build-up of a consequential chain of events. A lot of things are simply just coincidences. Not everything will have justice served for it. What justice is there in the fact that I am a girl that was born into a Kosovan family and that I grew up in the first-world city of London, but there is some other girl across the world who was born into poverty and experiences all kinds of adversity that I will never get to touch? I can’t seem to find the moral reasoning and justice behind something like this. I’m sure there are reasonable answers for this that I have yet to read into, but on the surface it just baffles me. It baffles me how the uncertainty and unfairness of life is just laid out bare and we accept it by saying it’s just the plan the universe has for us. I don’t believe it because, if it was true that everything is just ‘the universe’s prewritten plan’ then this would mean that the universe caters in the favour of every single individual - how can this happen without a conflict of interest?
As this skepticism grew in me, I found myself going through life with a different lens, and it became more apparent in the past year for me. I feel as though I’m now very hyper aware that things happen just because they happen, and there isn’t always a non-tangible, mystical justified reason behind it. Everything must just be a consequence of the previous thing. For example, some might say that this pandemic happened because it must have been for the best, it happened because everything that does happen should happen, it happened because the earth needed to breathe and people needed to start coming together more and embrace community, it happened so that people could take a break from their hectic 9-5 jobs and become a little more grounded. But the reality is, the pandemic happened because the disease originated in an animal and it transmitted to humans and spread between humans, and humans were simply not prepared or equipped with protection. It’s all logic. And it’s all obvious. And I can’t stand the fluffiness that is fed to us as comfort beyond the logic.
In a way, it seems as though now I just look at things in a pessimistic manner. I prefer to call it real, it just seems pessimistic because sadly, a lot of things that do happen just does happen to be bad. I can use this to my advantage now - and I call it ‘positive pessimism’. It’s the acceptance that things happen just because they do, and that it won’t always work in my favour or anyone else’s favour. It’s accepting that life is unfair and that there are no two ways about it. Adversity is inevitable - failure, loss, the whole lot. There’s nothing we can really do about the inevitability of it, so accepting it and working around it, and not relying on the comfort of the universe’s perfect prewritten plan to take care of it, is possibly the best way forward if we really do not want to go insane. Not everything happens because it helps us.
After writing this post, I googled some of what I wrote to see if I can find if anyone else thinks what I think, and I came across an article where Thomas Koulopoulos literally TOOK THE WORDS from my brain. He writes:
“The fact is that we've colloquialized the notion of there being a reason for everything to the point of absurdity. It's not that "reason" is completely absent from our lives, or that it should be, but that we use it as a crutch for avoiding growth and often look for it in all the wrong places; a higher power, fate, a preordained script for our life, a greater purpose, or some omnipotent force of the universe that knows what's best for us. What if it's none of the above?”
Please read his article here: https://www.inc.com/thomas-koulopoulos/its-time-to-say-it-everything-does-not-happen-for-a-reason.ht
it’s much better worded than what I’ve written.
Aurora
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