Stop telling people “everything happens for a reason” when something bad happens.

I don’t know why this phrase is everyone’s emotional reflex, but it needs to retire. Someone loses their job, gets sick, has a relationship fall apart, loses someone they love, and almost immediately someone swoops in with “everything happens for a reason” or “it’s part of a bigger plan.”

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No. It isn’t.

Bad things happen randomly. There is no cosmic lesson in a child getting cancer. There is no divine storyline behind a car accident. There is no hidden wisdom tucked inside grief, trauma, or loss. Sometimes suffering is just suffering. Senseless and cruel and unfair.

People say this stuff because randomness terrifies them. The idea that the universe doesn’t care, that there is no guarantee of fairness or meaning, makes people deeply uncomfortable. So they wrap tragedy in a neat little bow and call it purpose. It makes them feel better. It does absolutely nothing for the person actually hurting.

Your therapeutic cliché doesn’t make pain meaningful. It just makes the person going through it feel like they’re failing if they can’t find a silver lining. Like they’re supposed to turn devastation into a lesson or personal growth or gratitude. As if grief needs to be productive to be valid.

Sometimes things just suck. No reason. No lesson. No character arc. No eventual payoff waiting around the corner. Just awful things happening to people who didn’t earn them and didn’t deserve them.

Let people be angry. Let them be sad. Let them sit in the unfairness of it without trying to reframe it into something comforting for you. Not everything needs a deeper purpose. Not everything needs meaning attached to it.

I got hit with that line last week after some bad news, and it honestly made everything worse. I spent the rest of the night on my couch playing Grizzly’s Quest, still fuming about how dismissive it felt. Like my pain needed to be justified by some imaginary bigger picture instead of just being acknowledged as real.

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