I know a lot of people think this is bologna and can find numerous exceptions to this statement–especially when this phrase is interpreted to belittle someone’s experience when suffering (eg: “your child died? Everything happens for a reason…”).
However, when I think back on all the times people have said this, in the “trust that it’s happening the way it’s meant to” or “one door closes and another opens” blah blah type of way…actually, it’s pretty true. I can’t find any example in my life where that “devastating trauma” (oh the misery!) didn’t somehow lead me to something better or teach me something that led me to something better or whatever.
Is this the case with anyone else? Or am I just delusional/new agey/confirmation biased? I would love to hear stories about people’s experience with being convinced they’re doomed in the moment (and “forever–i just know it!!!”)only to find things actually ended up much better.
*i hope my telemundo style dramatics came through here in my comments.
Well, yeah, I’ve had the experience. Things seem bleak, and then the wind shifts and things are okay again.
I think the two principle causes are: selective perception, and the fact that civilization exists in order to produce those kinds of changes in our lives. We have so very many “safety nets” out there. When you get the sense that “someone is watching over you,” it might simply be your family, friends, neighbors, or the nice policeman patrolling the streets at night.
Mostly, it’s selective perception. It’s like “celebrity deaths always come in threes.” Well, no, they don’t. But if you are observing closely with that pattern in mind, you’ll likely see it.
(A friend got all excited by the mystical profundity of Douglas Adams and the number “forty-two.” He once said, in all innocence, “The more I look for that number, the more places I find it!”)
Consider yourself lucky. There are causes for everything, and you can make choices about your response to any situation and having a positive outlook on things is almost always going to help. And it is also true that there’s a certain amount of human tendency to treat minor disruptions to our lives as a huge deal - so when the sky doesn’t fall, it turns out things are not so bad and we can make the best of things and find ways that things are better. Does everything always work out for the best, though? No. You already mentioned an example where it doesn’t.
Your statement positively reeks of not only post hoc ergo propter hoc, but an argument from ignorance. That you have never experienced something serves only to prove that you’ve never experienced it, just as the fact that you learned a lesson from a traumatic event serves to prove nothing more than that people learn lessons from traumatic events. Implying some bizarre, and frankly disturbing, inverse causality - i.e trauma happens because people need to learn lessons - is outright silly. And wrong.
There’s that, and the fact that most people will be able to supply counterexamples. I sure as hell didn’t learn anything when my grandfather died of a rare, incurable cancer despite living healthily all his life. Nor did I take anything but a slough of grievous personal issues out of being bullied viciously for a great deal of my childhood. Some things just suck. In fact, not only do they suck, they suck like a Dyson on steroids, in the sense that they not only suck greatly to begin with, but they also never stop sucking.
Nothing ever happens because of some grand, underlying “plan”, as the “everything happens for a reason”-horseshit usually implies. That’s not to so there’s no such thing as causality, but this woo-ey concept of “for a reason” is disgustingly condescending by nature. You’re not going to get an overweight of “Oh-I-though-I-was-screwed-but-then-everything-was-better”-stories, because when the random vacillations of life really screw you over, it’s usually permanent and highly unpleasant.
Hey maybe it’s just me but it sounds like all that bullying didn’t beat you into silence for the rest of your life!
I am not looking to sound all high and mighty here, and I’m not saying that some things don’t just plain suck. But I guess what I’m saying is that I just can’t recall a time where, like said above, things that seemed crappy didn’t somehow result in something better. If that makes any sense.
Well, to use the example from your OP, I doubt anyone has ever looked back ten years after the death of their child and thought, “You know what? I’m better off now.”
I think you might be confusing “that wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be” with “that bad thing actually made things better”. You can survive the death of a child - and perhaps learn that you’re stronger than you thought you were - but that doesn’t make the world without your child better than a hypothetical one where your child lived.
Everything happens for a reason, but that doesn’t mean that everything is the way it ought to be. For instance, the reason that Palo Verde’s sister was killed was that some idiot was speeding, or driving drunk, or not paying attention to the road. The existence of this reason, though, does not make the death any less tragic.
I know correlation don’t equal no causation
I know that “it’s all good” ain’t true
I also know that there are some people who take a shitty situation and do something with it–does that mean it “happens for a reason”? I am sure that the 50 parents who got their kids home would never say, “thanks to Adam Walsh’s father’s tragedy my life is great!” … But maybe some of you get where I am coming from?
I know that in your thread about your bad job I told you that if you let it go, something better would probably come along anyway. I was in no way saying that god opens a window when he closes a door, everything happens for a reason, or any other superstitious or spiritual nonsense. I just meant that, in my experience, cutting my losses with something that was so-so but that I was holding on to for some reason usually results in something more to my tastes coming along. I’ve made myself available to it, I have more experience now, and I’ve learned something- in that way it “opens a door”, but god has nothing to do with it. Because there is no god.
ETA: maybe what I was trying to say is that, it’s more about what we do with what happens to us…and so if someone suddenly has some health scare and it “forces” them into a position where they can reassess and then make some different choices, maybe that seeing this having happened for that reason (correlation not causation) is not so bad?
Sure. I lost my job. Two weeks later, the want-ads advertised for the job I currently had. The funny thing is that they were hiring two people and wrote the ad so that someone they already worked with would qualify. It just happened that I had the same qualifications he did.
But I don’t call that a “reason.” I call it “damned good luck.”
I did lose a child due to one of the rarest genetic conditions known to man. There is nothing good about that. It doesn’t destroy me every day though because I got a ‘replacement’ daughter almost exactly a year later through luck and by taking an extreme chance on the genetic lottery once again. I choose to think the one I lost and my youngest daughter are one in the same but that will never take away the trauma of your child convulsing into irrecoverable seizures during my birthday party or finding out there is no hope for her on Father’s Day.
The stress of that triggered a later divorce like it often does and then resulted in my own collapse and stay in ICU for two weeks in 2009 with no hope given to my family. I made a full recovery thanks to only one doctor of many that never gave up.
I have it great now, better than ever really. I have a great job, great kids, and old friends value the fact that I am still around thanks to their emotional investments in prayer vigils.
What is the lesson in all this? I have no idea. Life sucks sometimes and you can recover for a time if you get lucky and try hard enough but there is still no guarantee that something just as bad won’t happen again. No matter what, everyone dies at the end of the story. It is best to keep a positive outlook no matter what and vague spiritualism can help you do that even if it isn’t logical but the title of your OP is false.
Things get bad and then they get better. Or worse. Then they get bad again and then they get better. Or worse.
And then you die.
One way of looking at life is to think that if something bad happens, then you’re due for something good. Like life is an equation that must be balanced. Another way of looking at it is to see life as change. Change can be good or bad, but whatever it is, it’s constant. So if life is looking bad now, it may get immediately better. Or immediately worse. But eventually it will get better…one day. If you’re in a bad patch now, just wait long enough and it will move on. Maybe the circumstances won’t change, but your mindset will.
“It will work out somehow” makes more sense to me than “Everything happens for a reason”. But YMMV.
“This too shall pass. Sometimes, it passes like a kidney stone, but it will pass.”
Having gone through the loss of a child myself, I refuse to believe that anything happens for a reason; based on my experiences, such a belief would require belief in some kind of force that is more sadistic and troll-like than I can possibly imagine. But I know I can get through just about anything because I know the pain isn’t forever, no matter how bad it is now. It doesn’t cheer me up, but it does give me some hope, and sometimes, hope is better than any “lesson”.
