Why do bad things happen to good people?

I feel uneasy when something bad happens, particularly to people who deserve the opposite. Traffic accidents, for example, are a constant source of unfairness. They are indiscriminate and unforgiving, particularly to the people with the least guilt – crossing the street or sitting in the backseat. The news outlets make sure that we know about the worst of these accidents, or the second worst on a day off.

For most of my life, I believed that an answer to the question exists. For example, a car accident must be preventable – drive slowly or be careful when crossing. Don’t go out in the car on a snowy day. That person who got sick? They must’ve eaten too much sugar, smoked, or something else. But what about the friends who got hit by a young BMW driver while waiting for a bus? Did they do something terrible and get punished by a cosmic entity?

I’ve found a variety of spiritual explanations for the problem: “There’s a greater plan for everyone, everything bad that happens now is for the good that will happen tomorrow”, “God takes the angels early” and so on. For example, you break a leg but it saves you from being drafted into the military and dying there. Also, a whole range of explanations are based on the concept of karma and punishment. A seemingly random terrible thing can be explained by that person’s previous sins. For ages, I was stuck in this kind of thinking, and probably still am.

Thinking Errors

Thinking errors or Cognitive distortions are beliefs that make a person perceive the world in a wrong way. It took me a while to realize that while the question “Why do bad things happen to good people” is not a thinking error, almost any answer to it is, and it can be one of a number of different ones.

I randomly read about the Fallacy of Fairness one day and had a slowly progressing lightbulb moment.

The Fallacy of Fairness is the belief that things that happen should be fair. You work hard, you need to get a reward. You do a good thing, it gives you a +1 karma. That person is good, they should be rewarded, and they should not be hit by a car. When an event happens, you feel bad because it is not fair. You try to find reasons for the event to make it fit within the realm in which only fair things are allowed to happen. The whole train of thought gives no relief as eventually, you reach the fundamental problem that bad things do happen to good people, and this makes no sense if the world is fair. But the world cannot be unfair.

A Chess Reference

In the game of Chess, players try to checkmate each other by executing multiple-move attacks. Most players will execute these multiple-move attacks no matter what their opponents play. However, not predicting a response would often defeat that attack after the first move, so sticking to the same plan would just lead to a defeat. The position changes after each move and you need to constantly rethink the position and look for new multiple-move combinations.

To translate this example to real life, let’s say a catastrophe happens. The world changes. It’s not fair. It’s easy to:

• Stick to the past. Say that the change in the world was not fair. We need it to be fair and we refuse to move on. However, in Chess, this leads to losing games – we are moving pieces without reevaluating the position.
• Explain it, and make it sound fair. The car was stolen because of bad karma. The dinosaurs did horrible things to each other and never traveled to Mars, that’s why they got the asteroid. However, trying to explain an evil with something like bad karma is also defined by Dr. Albert Ellis as Rationalization. It is yet another thinking error.

The correct response, if life was a game of Chess, would be to base your next move on the current position, not on the past position. We can’t control almost all of the bad stuff that happens. It can be random, or it can be for a reason, or it can be for a reason so stupid that we will never go to believe it even after seeing all 10 slides. We can only choose how we respond to the bad event.

My Current Answer

Bad things happen to good people because it is possible. Play an infinite number of chess games, and any possible position will eventually happen. Unlike Chess, life does not offer the relief of treating lost games as mistakes and the knowledge that a mistake is preventable. Life offers the Fallacy of Fairness as a chance to feel extra bad, and the Rationalization as a way out of feeling bad by blaming bad karma or hoping for a future cosmic reward.

We still have the opportunity to be kind to one another and to make sure good things also happen.