Causeless
I bet everyone has wondered the best way to piss me off. There are a lot of good ways to do so — I’m easy like that.
But the absolute best way to do that is to say that things happen for a reason; specifically, to tell me that things happen to *me* for a reason. (I don’t much care what you believe for yourself; most of my friends actually do believe this.)
I just watched 21 Grams the other night, which is what brought this up. The movie wasn’t exactly about how things happen for a reason (or that there’s no reason), it was more about how much of our lives depend on coincidence (not that stalking the person whose husband’s heart you have is a coincidence, per se). I agree with this: many things happen just because you were in an unexpected place for some weird reason. I can’t think of any obvious examples in my life offhand, but they are there, certainly.
I don’t think the universe provides if you wish or hope or want enough, or that if your dream doesn’t work out it’s because there’s a better dream right around the corner. Mourn your losses, then go out and make your better dream, because it’s sure as hell not going to find you. And the bad things that happen don’t happen so that you can learn something. Not that people don’t learn things, sometimes; not that good things don’t come out of the bad ones, sometimes; but these aren’t some divine reason for bad things to happen.
The reasoning behind “this all happens for a reason!” has always escaped me. Do you want to think that you deserve things? It seems that it’s all but inescapable, as a consequence of it happening for a reason. Is it better to doubt that you really wanted it — whatever value of it — you’d've had it, so you just didn’t want enough? That you were so very mistaken about what you wanted that the universe had to smack you down and show you a better way?
Maybe it’s comforting. I don’t find it comforting, but maybe other people do. I find it hurtful, really.
August 14th, 2004 at 9:37 am
I agree that it’s hurtful. And I sometimes wonder, too, when people say something like that to me, whether they don’t just want to get out of giving me some real sympathy. If things happen for a reason, then things will sort themselves out without their participation and there’s no need for them to buckle down and really understand what happened to me and empathize with it. Which would be what would actually make me feel better…
August 14th, 2004 at 10:14 am
Oh god, I hate that “everything has a reason” shit too. Makes me wanna tell someone to bite me ;)
I loved 21 Grams, though. Good movie.
August 14th, 2004 at 11:35 am
It’s because in hindsight, everything does have a reason; without a cause, it wouldn’t happen. The mistake is in thinking that because everything has a cause, something is selecting which causes happen.
Or, as Bill Bryson puts it in one of his books, “It’s easy to make the most banal situation sound extraordinary if you treat it as fateful.”
August 14th, 2004 at 4:30 pm
This is the most thought-provoking post I’ve read in a while. I’m posting my initial thoughts before I reread because I don’t want to “taint” my reaction with others’ comments.
I think I’m probably of the “for a reason” variety although I understand completely your revulsion towards it. My mother, for example (I don’t know why I keep bringing my family up lately on other people’s sites) is an extremist when it comes to “everything happens for a reason.” And I’ve always thought her extremism was a cop-out. A way to say, I’ll do what I can but in the end, I’m not responsible for things, God is, and I disagree with that take on faith. I don’t want to present my mom in an unrealistic light, so I will say that she has never pined about waiting for things to happen but has always taken a very active role in changing the things in her life she didn’t like, BUT she’s more apt to eventually succumb to the wear and tear and declare her actions not the cause, be it positive or negative, in the name of her faith, and I disagree vehemently with this.
However, the intuitive part of me does seem to recognize that just when I think it’s all gone to shit, things straighten somehow. You know the sort of thing, I’m sure and as an example, the most recent: broke and an escrow check comes in the mail from the mortgage company.
Maybe I’m not so much “everything for a reason” because that seems to imply not driving your own destiny, as in believing in the ability of the future to meet you halfway.
Thinking out loud, quite.
August 14th, 2004 at 4:37 pm
Reading the comments now…
I agree with Lil. Usually when someone consoles another in that manner, it’s because they’re trying to excuse themselves from participating in any truthful and intelligent exchange about it.
I also loved 21 Grams but I can’t remember enough about it to imagine why this may have sparked such a conversation unless it was why her character had to die and it was “for a reason” because it gave life to Penn. Still, for some people, the “for a reason” is a comforting explanation when no other can be found. My real father died when my mother was pregnant with me so maybe that affected her already-bent disposition towards it. “For a reason” is especially popular in death situations for people seeking relief. And that movie was definitely about seeking relief.
I’ve not read Bryson but I can’t imagine how making something sound fateful could possibly make it seem extraordinary. On the contrary, I think it rather diminishes it to remove it from the hands of the realm of true (and cruel) mortality and place it in the hands of fate.
August 14th, 2004 at 4:41 pm
Apparently “I can’t imagine” is the popular phrase tonight. I’m always irritated to find this in my writing. Last week, in that stupid debate, it was “for the record” which I repeated twice in one thread. Oh well, what can I say, I don’t preview unless I’m posting complicated (for me) code.
August 14th, 2004 at 4:52 pm
There is a slight difference between a reason and a cause. (Ignoring the title of the post) I talked about things happening for reasons — or not. I’m sure we can all track back what decisions and bits of chance led to any given thing happening. But that doesn’t mean there was a reason — a god, a fate, a benign or not so benign universe — making these things happen (usually so we can learn something). And when you’re being told “these things happen for a reason”, they don’t mean the cause sense.
I don’t think most people intend it to be nasty; I think most of them intend it to help. “You’re not hurting for nothing. Something good will happen because of this.” The because of relates to cause — you can always trace things back far enough.
A bit maybe it’s not knowing how to comfort, how to deal with pain. And pain hurts, you want someone to stop hurting. And I guess if this is something that makes you feel better . . .
Not me.
August 14th, 2004 at 6:06 pm
I know.
August 16th, 2004 at 2:12 am
The example Bryson gives is Feynman: “Can you believe, on the way here tonight, I saw a car with the license plate 846 XJW! Of all the license plates in this state, what are the odds that I would see just that one tonight!”
I’m not sure I’m a believer in “everything happens for a reason” so much as I am a believer in, “Why worry about why it happened when you could be worrying about what could happen next.” It’s not so much about the reasons things happened as about the reasons you’re providing for the things that haven’t happened yet.
I’m not sure I’m making sense, or even if I’m on topic. Sorry about that.
August 16th, 2004 at 7:19 am
Sorry, Michelle, hadn’t read your comments when I posted, and then I was enplaned.
Sure, after things get their worst, they get better. This is rather by definition, though; I know that sometimes when I thought things couldn’t get worse they did. But eventually they didn’t keep getting worse. (Similarly things don’t keep getting better, unfortunately.)
Yes, I think for-a-reason-ing is about relief — this isn’t pointless pain — but I still think it comes off offensive, at least to non-reasoners.
This wasn’t a part of the movie, it was just something it made me think of, because people usually turn all those coincidences into the universe making things happen. I’m really not sure how many of them are coincidences, though: it’s not a coincidence that he stalked the person whose heart he had’s wife, or that the two of them stalked the guy who killed him. The death was chance, but little else.
I think that figuring out why something happened is good, to determine what you can do to help it happen or not happen again. I’ve seen that same quote, and I think the reasoning it shows elevates mundane stuff and minimises the important stuff.
August 16th, 2004 at 8:02 am
I think what tends to bother me about the “it’s for a reason” response to grief and tragedy is that it seems (or serves) to direct attention away from the pain and the individual suffering it. I can understand the impulse, but some kinds of pain are too deep and awful to be soothed in that manner (well, at least if your belief is not as profound as the grief) and for someone to offer that “consolation” is an indication that they are on some basic level not “getting it.” Also, I find it somewhat presumptuous to offer your own explanation of what a tragedy means, or to even expect that it necessarily means anything. If any meaning comes out of it, it has to come from the person who experienced it — at least for me. Again, it seems to be minimizing the experience for the person most effected — like anyone can make sense of a profoundly personal event — indeed, I suspect that the “it’s a reason” response is often as much about reassuring the speaker (oh, it’s horrible, but that doesn’t mean the world is horrible) as comforting the sufferer — and thus can give off a selfish vibe.
But then I tend to find a lot of expressions of faith presumptuous when I don’t share the faith in question, and especially when it seems to be unthinkingly assumed that I do. YMMV.
Rana
August 16th, 2004 at 12:12 pm
Bingo, Rana, it’s the individual “consoling” basically copping out on working to understand on an individual level. Well-meaning perhaps, but that’s what bugs me too.
June 19th, 2006 at 4:13 pm
[…] See, I super duper secretly want bad stuff to happen. So do all of you who’ve had bad things happen, which is pretty much everyone in the world. I’ve complained about this before. If you think things happen to *you* for a reason, go right ahead and believe it. But don’t you tell me that it’s true for me. “The dualistic model of karma says: I hit Bob, so someone will hit me. It’s a very cause / effect (a.k.a. Newtonian) way to deal view this phenomena. But from the non-dualistic, entangled [quantum] model, it’s different. It says that action or thought (which are the same “thing”) arises in a piece of my consciousness. There is a certain frequency or vibration associated with that. By taking the action, I endorse that reality so that I am not connected to the Universe by that frequency or vibration. Everything “out there” of the same frequency will respond to it, and they will then be reflected in your reality. By this notion, everything in your life–people, places, things, times and events–are nothing but reflections of your signature vibration” (p. 110-111). […]