When Bad Things Happen to Good People

Kate Bowler’s experience with a stage four cancer diagnosis illuminates the many unhelpful ways people seek to rationalize, minimize, or fix personal tragedy. Beneath gestures of advice or comfort is often a need for control, rooted in the belief that suffering must be explainable or deserved.

Rationalizing Suffering With Causality and Blame Narratives

Following Bowler’s diagnosis, responses from friends and acquaintances focused on uncovering causes or finding lessons. Researchers in her life frantically explored diagnoses, genetic mutations, and medical options, striving to “out-know” the disease in the hope of enhancing predictability and personal agency. Bowler describes being surrounded by paperwork, searching for clues late at night, desperately trying to control the uncontrollable.

Many health advocates linked her cancer to diet and lifestyle, offering nutritional advice, delivering juicers, and urging dietary solutions. This often crossed into subtle victim-blaming, with individuals suggesting that specific eating habits caused her illness. Bowler recounts someone slapping a cookie from her hand, associating sugar with cancer as if her choices precipitated her suffering.

Faith communities also responded with explanations rooted in scripture, repeated prayers, and offers of spiritual tools to fill a perceived lack of faith. Bowler was urged to recite triumphant scripture or given assurances that God’s justice or a spiritual gap was relevant to her case. These reactions, whether drawing from Christian or other religious beliefs like reincarnation, attempted to pour certainty and sense over her pain—giving her a system to locate fault, solution, or spiritual lapse in her suffering.

Prosperity Gospel Blames Individuals By Suggesting Positive Thinking and Spiritual Practice Prevent or Cure Illness

Bowler explains the American Prosperity Gospel’s origins, emerging from late 19th-century religious philosophy about the mind’s power. This tradition, influenced by “new thought” movements, teaches that by harnessing one’s thoughts and speaking positively—mirroring divine acts of creation—a person can control reality. Prosperity Gospel believers maintain that suffering arises from failed faith or improper positive thinking, thereby implying personal responsibility for illness or hardship.

For those like Bowler who endure chronic illness or tragedy, Prosperity Gospel logic creates tremendous guilt and pressure. If everyone can access divine power, then no one has an excuse for misfortune: suffering is proof of spiritual inadequacy. Prosperity Gospel followers become frustrated with patients who do not embrace faith healers or spiritual techniques, as though ignoring a light switch on their own wellbeing. Bowler has attended funerals where people were never permitted to admit the reality of suffering and death, forced instead to maintain an unwarranted optimism up to the end.

The Psychological Drive Behind These Unhelpful Responses Stems From a Human Need to Believe In a Just, Predictable World Where Suffering Has Rational Explanations

Bowler and Vedantam highlight a psychological need underpinning these responses: belief in a just world. People cling to the idea that life is fundamentally fair, and suffering can always be rationalized as a result of character, choices, or divine justice. By transforming tragedy into a lesson, blessing, or test, people can impose order on chaos—a defense mechanism protecting them from the fear that harm could strike anyone at random, including themselves.

This pressure is heightened by Americ ...

Kate Bowler and Shankar Vedantam explore modern selfhood, the cost of seeking control, and the beauty found in accepting vulnerability and uncertainty.

Buffered Self: A Control-Focused Stance Blocking Beauty, Connection, and Authentic Living

Bowler describes today's "buffered" self as one obsessed with self-optimization, where every act and experience must yield meaning, longevity, or happiness. This mindset treats personal growth as a never-ending project—life reduced to a series of assignments, with dark chapters seen as problems to be solved, contained, and improved. In the age of AI, social media, and infinite possibilities, the pressure to continually extract utility and meaning from each moment becomes exhausting.

Vedantam uses the metaphor of a tortoise shell to illustrate how defensive postures create psychological armor. While this shell may protect against pain, it also seals off goodness, beauty, and genuine connection. Bowler agrees, arguing that striving to immunize ourselves against uncertainty often leads to an internal prison—impervious to the beauty that flourishes when defenses are lowered.

The Porous Self, Open to Good and Bad, Shapes Life Through Uncontrollable Forces, Revealing Greater Beauty and Meaning

Bowler invokes philosopher Charles Taylor's distinction between the "buffered" and "porous" self. The porous self, while more vulnerable, is open to being shaped by both terror and delight, despair and reality. This stance rejects clenched control and welcomes life's unpredictability, realizing that humans cannot manage or outwit all suffering and uncertainty.

Bowler contends that relinquishing obsessive self-making and embracing a porous openness allows more beauty and joy to materialize. By letting go of the delusion of total control, individuals gain access to deeper connection and unexpected beauty, freed from the demand to turn every moment into self-improvement.

Embracing Absurdity Alleviates the Exhausting Pursuit of Meaning In Suffering

Bowler describes how absurdity can become a salvation amidst suffering. Facing cancer, she found both tragedy and unexpected delight to be senseless and arbitrary—there is no requirement for bad or good events to be meaningful. Instead, delight emerges in absurd, random adventures: visiting the world’s largest thermometer or frying pan, finding joy merely in the strange and pointless.

This embrace of the absurd frees people from the pressure to extract lessons from every experience, allowing them to enjoy moments of delight and randomness. Life’s fullness can surface precisely when, rationally, it should feel empty. Acceptance, rather than relentless improvement, brings a sense of liberation and authenticity to whoever one becomes.

Accepting Vulnerability: Seeking Help and Allowing Others to Serve Fosters Connection and Meaningful Relationships

Bowler shares how suffering can spur a false belief that needing help marks personal failure, leading to isolation. She initially felt that sharing her needs would only burden others and deepen her sense of aloneness. Yet she discovered this belief is untrue.

People derive deep satisfaction from being useful and supporting others. Allowing o ...

Neuroscience reveals that spirituality is not just a belief or philosophical stance, but a biological capacity with profound impacts on resilience, meaning-making, and wellbeing—especially in times of adversity.

Neural Circuits in the Brain Producing Perceptions of Love, Guidance, and Being Never Alone Define Spiritual Experience, Regardless of Faith or Practice

Scientific research demonstrates that distinct neural circuits are responsible for the perceptions central to spiritual experiences: feelings of love, guidance, being held, and never being alone. Lisa Miller explains that these three interconnected networks can be seen activating in real time during practices like prayer, meditation, experiencing awe in nature, or deep relationship with others. Functional MRI studies confirm that recounting authentic spiritual experiences—whether invoking God, nature, or an unnamed force—triggers the same neural pathways.

Neural Networks Activated In Spiritual Practices: Prayer, Meditation, Nature, Relationships

Regardless of whether one prays in church, meditates at home, feels awe watching sunlight on water, or connects deeply through music and art, the same neural circuits ignite. Creativity can induce spiritual states, with inspiration in the arts activating these networks much like mystical experiences.

Spiritual Circuits in Humans Are Heritable, Suggesting Spirituality Is Innate, Not a Learned Belief System

Twin studies reveal that the brain's transcendent circuitry is heritable, underscoring that spirituality is an inborn human trait, not merely a learned cultural pattern. This neural capacity is present in all individuals, religious or not.

The Label of the Transcendent Source Does Not Determine Neural Circuits, Indicating Experience Drives Spiritual Neurobiology

The neural architecture for perception of the transcendent is consistent across faiths and nonreligious practices. The specific name or concept used for the transcendent source—God, Hashem, Allah, Jesus, nature, or simply "spirit"—does not affect which neural circuits are used. The core driver is the direct, perceived experience, not the label or doctrine.

Spiritual Practices Enhance Well-Being: Stress Reduction, Resilience, Recovery, and Purpose

Engagement in spiritual practices provides measurable benefits for mental health and recovery from stress and trauma.

Regular Spiritual Practices Linked To Lower Addiction, Depression, Anxiety, and Stronger Moral Character

Data show that people who cultivate their natural spirituality are less prone to addiction, depression, and anxiety, and develop deeper character and stronger commitments. This positive impact is broad and foundational to well-being.

Spiritual Practices Aid Recovery From Stress and Trauma By Activating the Brain's Transcendent Networks, Creating a Sense Of Being Held and Guided

Spirituality facilitates faster physiological recovery from trauma and stress by engaging the brain’s transcendent networks. Practices like prayer and meditation provide a lived sense of being loved, connected, and guided, which anchors and strengthens individuals during hardship.

Service-Oriented Spiritual Practices Enhance Neural-Level Spiritual Awareness, Embodying Prayer

Service is identified as one of the most effective ways to deepen spiritual awareness at the neural level. Engagement in serving others increases activity in spiritual circuits—the science shows "service is prayer in action." Spiritually grounded communities built around service foster collective awareness and individual growth.

Neural Circuits For Transcendent Experiences Mirror Those for Loving Connections

Neuroscience has established that the neural pathways for spiritual connection with the transcendent are the same as those activated when connecting with other people and fellow beings.

Neural Commonality Unites Differing Theological Frameworks

This neurobiological commonality bridges divides between theological traditions, uniting humanist, theist, and secular spiritualities. Whether through direct experience of the divine or deep human relationship, the relational spirituality is fundamentally the same in neural terms.

Neurology of Transcendence and Connection Shows Serving and Loving Deepens Perception

Loving others and serving the community not only promote connection but also intensify the awakened brain’s perception of the transcendent, showing that “as you do unto others, you do unto me” is rooted in neurobiology.

Neuroscience Supports Secular Spiritual Communities, Showing Service and Connection Activate Awakened Brain Networks Across Religions

Collective spiritual awakening often occurs in communities—even secular or unaffiliated ones—where people practice awe, connection, or service together. The presence of spiritually engaged individuals can amplify transcendent connection in others, suggesting we can “hold presence” and consciousness for one another.

Hardship Catalyzes Spiritual Growth: Suffering Increases Practice By 250%

Research tracking individuals over decades shows that suffering catalyzes profound spiritual growth. People enduring deep betrayal, loss, illness, or trauma are 250% more likely to turn to spiritual practices.

Suffering Spurs Spirituality and Connection When Coping Fails

When typical coping fails, adversity compels people to seek connection to the deeper source of life through prayer, meditation, and practices opening the spiritual aperture. This is not about shouldering pain alone but about discovering innate resilience through a sense of being accompanied and guided.

Spiritual Response to Suffering Unlocks Neural Networks

Intentional spiritual response to adversity changes perception, opening the lens from self-centeredness to interconnectedness and activating the brain’s transcendent networks. Rather than breaking us, hardship can rebuild us spiritually.

Adversity Transforms Perception From Self-Centeredness to Interconnectedness With Larger Forces

Adversity can shift perspective from self to a sense of oneness with larger forces, leading to deeper meaning and a more purpose-driven, service-oriented life.

Synchronicity: Meaningful Coincidence Revealing Deeper Patterns, a Legitimate Spiritual Perception Beyond Mere Pattern-Finding or Wishful Thinking

Synchronicity refers to meaningful coincidences that reveal deeper patterns and direction, offering blueprints for action, relationships, and decision-making.

Distinguishing Genuine Synchronicity From False Patterns Requires Developing Discernment Through Practice, Attending To Undeniable Patterns Resonating With Inner Wisdom

Recognizing true synchronicity is a skill honed through practice and discernment. Genuine synchronicities resonate deeply with inner wisdom and produce bold, undeniable patterns, distinguishing them from mere wishful thinking or random pattern-finding.

Synchronicities Offer Opportunities or Invitations ...