Everything does NOT happen for a reason and the universe does not care about you.

[Darkover]

The word is non-deterministic and imo when good or bad things happen there is no reason or plan with your prosperity in mind. We can draw and extrapolate meaning from events retroactively but it does not give any weight to this 'reason' people tell me about. This is just pattern recognition and correlation does not mean causation. The world and universe is random and good/ bad things happen without digression.

 

[QueerMelancholy]

I think I am on the other side of this topic. I prefer to think causal determinism makes the most sense to me but I'm not so stringent in my beliefs to say anything I believe is absolutely right or wrong because I don't know the truth and there are no absolute truths just generally agreed upon "objective" facts but even I have a problem believing in objective facts because everything I even think I know is filtered through my subjective understanding of it.

But I also don't believe in fatalism which a lot of people mistake as determinism. The difference between determinism and fatalism as I know it is that fatalism means that the outcome would have been the same regardless of what you did while determinism is closer in my mind to mean that the outcome stemmed from what was done or what happened before it in the causal chain.

Even the usage of good or bad falls on subjecting reasoning in my opinion. Nature itself is disinterested in the rightness or wrongness of anything and is wholly immoral in that sense. I feel that people have an issue with this when they try and find the meaning of things or calculate the value of anything when they're using moral ideology to do so.

There can be a world where nothing is planned out in nature because there is no grand almighty being putting their thumb on the scale to shift causality in any direction. Even the need for a reason requires subjective reasoning involved and even that is in my opinion causal in itself because what we know and what we believe is very much an outcome of our social learning, our environments, our biology, and our psychology.

You also have small-sized matter that when motion piles up outcomes become probabilistic and as the scales get bigger that probability can be measured more accurately and safely be labeled "deterministic".

The need for a reason for things to happen is a human need, not a cosmic need. A human desire for meaning in what we think of as being chaotic without purpose. But why does anything need a purpose? There is no good or bad here, no reason, no need to believe in everything happening for some grand purpose. If you wound back the universe through time to the beginning and let it play out again the primordial fluctuations stemming from the Big Bang would follow the same statistical properties as our universe does now. Yes, there would not be an identical pattern between that universe and our own. The exact locations of stars and planets and galaxies and solar systems would be in different locations. But the causality is still there in the fluctuations. And I don't think uncertainty violates causality it can violate determinism though if you're mistaking fatalism for determinism.

There is no unavoidable destiny. There's also no need for anything to have a meaning or reason to exist outside the human narrative. If you believe in natural laws that are objective laws and are proven to be true through objective forms of testing no matter how you subjectively perceive them then these laws are the constraints that hold our universe together.

Extrapolating meaning from something that doesn't need meaning to exist in the first place is like trying to get blood from a stone. The universe isn't interested in the needs or desires of the living no matter how intelligent they deem themselves to be. We all live and we all die and the universe will go on with or without us. To anyone who thinks the universe is interested in our prosperity needs to ask themselves what their motivations are behind that belief. Happiness breeds prosperity, not the universe.

 

[untothedepths]

I'm starting to feel like i dont care about the universe either. Just let me end this pain already, please.

 

[Hollowman]

Whenever I hear someone say "everything happens for a reason" I think what reason could there be that kids get abused by religious leaders? Such a dumb saying.

 

[EvisceratedJester]

Well, why would the universe care about me? The universe isn't some sentient being or anything.

 

[Forever Sleep]

I think it's something we try and placate ourselves with. Sometimes I even find myself doing it to myself. Maybe this truly awful thing that just happened will lead to something better. Sometimes, it has actually worked out like that. One of my most crushing experiences lead me to abandon a career I had little hope in succeeding in and pursuing one in which I've had more success. At the time, it felt like the end of the world though.

I suppose a lot of people tell themselves that crap to stop themselves nose diving into depression. If we don't believe things have a hope of getting better, we probably won't even bother trying anymore- which kind of guarantees failure. So- while I think it's probably all bullshit too, I just think it's a coping mechanism I suppose.