Why me?
When you (or someone you love) are diagnosed with a serious illness, you ask yourself what most people do in times like that: “Why me?” You genuinely wonder why this bad thing came knocking on your door instead of somebody else’s. You might have done nothing wrong. But hey, misfortunes don’t check your background before deciding to pay you a visit.
It’s human nature to notice when things deviate from our expectations. It’s only when those expectations aren’t met that we start asking questions. We look for explanations, blame genetics, blame environment, blame lifestyle, blame our boss, blame our ex. But when we experience years of unbroken well-being, we don’t spend nearly as much time trying to explain it, or even acknowledge it1. For most of my life, I assumed a life without bad surprises was a given. From a purely statistical perspective though, that is at least as puzzling as a life with some bumps. Our bodies are incredibly complicated machines, prone to malfunction in thousands of small ways, so how come they run smoothly for so many years? Our lives are highly unpredictable, even if you try to control every tiny detail. The fact that we share this planet with seven-billion-plus people, each taking their own decisions, moving in complex or even random ways, makes a predictable life almost impossible.
So, what if we look at any piece of misfortune not as a shocking deviation but one possibility among many? Though it might feel unnatural at first, it replaces some of the anger or sense of betrayal with a recognition that we were never singled out to remain immune2.
The other side of that coin is acknowledging that good outcomes, health, success, happiness, aren’t exactly owed to us either. By the usual laws of probability, good fortune is as strange as bad fortune. Recognizing that can actually make us more grateful. Realizing my own uninterrupted health could be considered a small miracle made me more appreciative of it. We rarely hold up the good and ask “Why me?”. But if we did, we might be overwhelmed by how many things quietly go right every day.
It's humbling and freeing to realize that we aren't chosen for only good or bad things. Life gives us a mix of both.
When bad things happen, I'll just pause and think, Why not me?.
Footnotes
-
This tendency to home in on negative events is well-documented in psychology as the as the negativity bias (Baumeister et al., 2001). ↩
-
Learned optimism (Seligman, 1990) suggests that we can train ourselves to interpret misfortunes less as personal attacks and more as events that simply “could happen”—and, on occasion, do. ↩