Random Evil
No, Not Everything Happens for a Reason
About Random Evil - A Series of Essays
Random Evil challenges the belief that everything happens for a reason, especially in the context of trauma and healing. While some moments in life feel guided or meaningful, many forms of suffering are neither lessons nor spiritual invitations. They are the result of chaos, chance, or human choice.
This book rejects cosmic victim-blaming and spiritual bypassing, offering an ethical framework for healing that does not require justification of harm. It sits at the intersection of spirituality and skepticism, honoring mystery without sanctifying suffering.
Healing, it argues, does not require a reason.
“This essay is part of an ongoing series that will become a book.”
Essay 1
Random Evil
No, Not Everything Happens for a Reason
There is a sentence people reach for when they don’t know what to do with another person’s pain.
Everything happens for a reason.
It’s offered gently. Often with good intentions. Sometimes wrapped in spirituality, sometimes in psychology, sometimes in a shrug that means I can’t sit with this.
But when someone is in real pain, the sentence doesn’t land as comfort.
It lands as closure.
It ends the conversation before it begins.
For the person who has just lost a child, survived abuse, lived through violence, or had their life altered by something sudden and devastating, this phrase creates an impossible task. It asks them to find meaning before they have been allowed to feel loss. It asks them to explain what has not yet been metabolized. It suggests that understanding is a prerequisite for healing.
It isn’t.
The need to believe the world is orderly runs deep. Randomness unsettles us. Chaos frightens us. If everything happens for a reason, then pain can be organized, catalogued, and eventually justified. The universe becomes legible again. Safe again.
But that safety often belongs to the observer, not the sufferer.
For the person who was harmed, the question “What was the reason?” quietly becomes “What did I miss?” or worse, “What did I do wrong?”
Meaning turns inward.
Blame follows.
In healing spaces, this belief can be especially corrosive. Survivors are encouraged to reframe trauma as growth opportunities, awakenings, or necessary initiations. Anger is treated as resistance. Grief is treated as something to move through quickly, lest it obstruct enlightenment.
Pain becomes a test to pass rather than a wound to tend.
This is not wisdom.
It is discomfort avoidance dressed as philosophy.
There is a difference between accepting what happened and explaining it. There is a difference between peace and premature resolution. And there is a profound difference between meaning that emerges organically and meaning that is demanded.
Some things should be mourned, not translated.
Some things do not need to fit into a larger story to be survivable.
And some sentences, no matter how familiar or well-intentioned, do more harm than good.
Cynthia