Everything serves a purpose in hindsight

Life can only be understood by looking backward; but it must be lived looking forward.

– Søren Kierkegaard

Most of the things happening to us right now that don't seem to make any sense will ultimately become meaningful.

That's because :

• Either everything actually serves a purpose and is leading you somewhere.
• Or, you'll just interpret it that way looking back thanks to apophenia, which is the name for our tendency to perceive patterns in things whether they exist or notFor example, when you see an animal in the clouds, that's an instance of pareidolia, a visual subset of apophenia.. It's a nifty human coping mechanism, as we crave and look for meaning even where there is none, which is technically all the time since meaning doesn't exist outside human interpretation.

Another way to look at it is that depending on your mindset, and with a bit of ingenuity, everything can be an opportunity for growth whether it was "designed" to be or not. Indeed, even if "providence" is actually completely incoherent, you can intentionally learn from all your experiences and in that sense, they will end up amounting to a fairly cohesive "story of your life" in hindsight.

So, cryptic universe magic or wishful post-hoc rationalization doesn't really matter. In the end, the result is the same.

Consequently, if you're currently feeling distraught and lost due to a chaotic situation that seems completely arbitrary, you can take some reassurance knowing that independently of the fact of the matter, you'll perceive what happened as serving a purpose eventually one way or the other. You may not be able to trust the universe/providence/causality/God, but you can trust your future self to make it make sense.

And at the end of the day, that's the only thing that really matters. Meaning is always generated by humans, not cold hard facts in and of themselves (nor deities for that matter). Whether the two are superimposed is secondary in this case.

No sense spitting in the face of a Catch-22 when it's doing the Lord's work ;) and helping you sleep at night.

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