I’ve honestly not heard people say “everything happens for a reason” out there in the wild. It seems to me it’s a problem people complain about more often than it exists. Or maybe I just don’t know very many people dumb enough to keep saying it.
Oh it most certainly exists out there in the wild. Coming from the kind of deep thinkers that you can imagine.
Mr. Boink, this is a small town and I already know he needs two knee replacements and his wife recently left him and “took everything” so I think right there we know why he is cranky.
solipsism means “everything is about me” (and I didn’t look it up) I think …well, in my head it is. maybe not always but usually.
I need to know more about this.
I will respectfully disagree: I think that larger-scale effects tend to drown out these smaller-scale effects.
How many elections are won by only a single vote? And…was there ever an actual battle that was lost because of a single horseshoe nail? Also, aren’t most genetic mutations non-operative entirely, because DNA is both good at self-repair and also somewhat redundant? Don’t most radiation-caused mutations come in large clusters, due to larger-scale radiation exposure? Are single-atom events really that common in vital gene-changing mutations? (In the form of a question because I don’t know the answers here.)
Certainly, there is a significant background buzz at the quantum level, and, now and then, it manages to become amplified enough that we can perceive it. But, really, most elections and battles are won by fairly significant margins.
I do not take this to the degree of believing in an Asimov-style “psychohistory,” by which large-scale events can be predicted. But my reasoning would not be based on quantum randomness, but, rather, on the really, really vast web of interconnected macroscopic events. I have had life-changing events based on a random change of a tv channel, but I think this is a sociological effect, not a quantum one.
sshhh it’s a SecretTM
That’s where I came in to make a point.
Yes, everything happens for a reason. That reason is completely mundane and not associated with anyone or any thing’s plans. It is merely the convergence of events in that moment.
A cell is mutated or damaged by a random high energy particle, a chemical you have been exposed to, or because there was an error in cell division. It grows and spreads. Cancer results.
A sperm cell or egg is damaged by the same things. A birth defect results.
Water seeps into a roadway and goes through a couple of freeze/thaw cycles, tearing up the asphalt. Eventually it comes apart and a hole develops as tires continually going over the loose rubble bounce it out of the hole. You come along and you’re more worried about your coffee than the shape of the road or you don’t see it because it was hidden from view by the vehicle in front of you. You drive over it. The resulting bump throws hot coffee all over you and your car. No, that wasn’t God trying to tell you something, or bad things happening to you because you deserve it. It was a convergence of a number of things coming together to create a bad result in that moment.
You’re walking down the street and some asshole decides to jump you and take your money. Why? Not because it’s part of God’s plan or because you deserve it. It happened because asshole was there on his schedule, looking for people he thinks he can take, in a window of opportunity when no one else is around or close enough to do it. Your schedule and activities just happened to coincide with you walking through that window. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else, or perhaps no one would have entered the window.
Like I said to one of my teachers who liked to claim that God had a purpose in teaching people with natural disasters and shit like that: If God’s plan is that because of an Earthquake or Hurricane, we should learn something about a completely unrelated human activity that no one could reasonably associate with such a disaster, then God is a moron, because he’s using the wrong methods to attempt to teach Humans anything. Since we must assume that if God exists, he is not such a moron; then we must conclude that natural disasters and daily events have fuck-all to do with trying to teach us unrelated lessons on subjects that no reasonable person could connect. God isn’t teaching you to be nicer to others by having you hit a bump and spill coffee on yourself, nor is he making a statement about Gay Rights by throwing Hurricanes at us.
- You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair.
Then I thought ‘Wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair,
and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we
actually deserve them?’ So now I take great comfort in the general
hostility and unfairness of the universe.
[Marcus Cole - Babylon 5]