"Everything happens for a reason."

What an infuriating phrase. People say it at the worst times, too: at a funeral, during a tragedy of any sort, when you're fuming or distraught and unprepared to get into the finer points of philosophy, like "Did the Holocaust happen for a reason, Janice?" And what's more, they seem to say this as comfort. Like it's helping.

But why?

I think some people like the sound of their own voice, and will just trot out the first nostrum that comes to mind, regardless of occasion. But that alone can't explain the utter domination of our culture by this phrase.

Is it said out of ignorance? I've heard it out of workers and bourgeois alike, so if it's ignorance, it's some element of false consciousness that the bourgeoisie swallowed wholesale itself first.

But because the workers can't afford the luxury of utopian thinking, if it's believed by widespread numbers of workers, it has to at least not be hurting them, or even perhaps helping them, if they have believed it for any length of time. Predestination and magic as memes involved in religious practice reoccur over and over again over the millennia, both of them demonstrations of some kind of belief that random chance does not ordain the cosmos.

But why?

What is so useful about the belief that everything happens for a reason?

Back in Omaha for the winter

Hello everyone, long time no post.

As always, there's a good reason for that. The laptop is on its last legs, but everytime it seems to get better at the last moment so I don't replace it. If the laptop's electric is bad, the van's electric is worse, and I have to resort to electroshock therapy half the time to get it moving. Going into town from my homestead became such a chore that I ended up dreading it, and avoiding trips for all but the most important things, because it'd often be a day or two before I could get the van moving again.

It's not the battery, and after extensive unprofessional diagnosing I'm pretty sure it's not the alternator either. I haven't fully ruled out the spark plugs, but I don't think it's that either, because sometimes when the electric is low the AC will randomly come on even though it's off. That is a symptom of every Chrysler owner's most dreaded problem: a fault with the electric brain. The electric brain is a part that never used to exist, it's not strictly necessary to the operation of a motor vehicle, but it improves gas mileage at the cost of rendering the vehicle a particularly well-engineered brick when it dies. The electric brain itself isn't particularly expensive, but like many things in a Chrysler it's buried someplace almost inaccessible, in this case inside the engine block. So a few hundred dollars of part is accompanied by about a thousand dollars of labor.

The van isn't undriveable, after all I did get here in the end. But it's touch-and-go enough that I won't be leaving Omaha in the spring until and unless it's fixed. And it was getting less driveable as the weather got colder, which is why I called the season a bit early and came home. But at least this way, I get to see the leaves fall.