Everything Happens for a Reason

Everything happens for a reason. I hear this from a lot of people. But is this maxim true? Usually when people say this they are trying to make sense of significant life events. What about going to store to pick up milk? Don’t the little things matter? If everything happens for a reason then the little things should matter, too. But like I said, this maxim is something people invoke when significant things happen. Otherwise, we would have to accept that random things happen in life. That just doesn’t set well with a lot of people, especially when tragic things happen.

If everything happens for a reason, then there is a cause for every effect. I certainly wouldn’t argue with that. It’s just that the reason for something happening probably isn’t what people think it is. If we resort to saying that something happened for a reason, and it’s not the thing that just preceded it, then we are grasping at straws trying to attach meaning to experience. Ambiguity is difficult for people to accept. We feel like we are floundering in a chaotic universe in which random things can happen to us. But is it worth resorting to this kind of deterministic thinking?

When we say that everything happens for a reason, we are saying that there must be a reason in the overall scheme of things for why things happen to us. This is a form of rationalization. If we believe we have free will and can make choices in life, then we shouldn’t have to resort to rationalization. We should, instead, plan ahead and adjust how we respond to things. We have no control over the past. All we can do is try to respond differently to things in the future. By owning our lives, living responsibly, and letting the people who matter know that they matter, then when tragedy strikes, we won’t have regrets. We can still feel grief and sadness. We are only human. Bad things happen. Tragedy strikes good people.

So, we need to realize that when something happens and we resort to saying that everything happens for a reason, we aren’t really looking for a reason, we are trying to justify what happened. Trying to attach meaning to experience is natural. But finding that “meaning” isn’t the reason why something happened; it’s just something that helps us sleep better and face the next day. And that’s probably the biggest reason that we say that everything happens for a reason.