I've Started to Believe That Things Work Out for a Reason

I've Started to Believe That Things Work Out for a Reason

growing up is weird when nothing goes the way you thought it would

hasif 💌

Oct 11, 2026

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I’ve always found it annoying when people say everything happens for a reason. It sounds lovely when you’re sitting across from someone who’s had a good year, found love, got the job, moved to a city they like, and suddenly everything that went wrong five years ago has become part of a very satisfying story. It’s a little harder to appreciate the philosophy when you’re watching something you’ve wanted for years fall apart, when everyone around you seems to be moving forward and you’re left wondering why your own life looks nothing like you thought it would.

I think I used to hate the idea because I wanted an explanation for things while they were happening. I wanted to know why something had to go wrong, why somebody had to leave, why something I had spent so much time wanting suddenly became impossible. I wanted the universe, or God, or whoever was supposed to be in charge of all this, to give me an explanation. Preferably one that made sense immediately, because apparently I have very little patience when it comes to being miserable.

And the worst part is, sometimes you never find out why things had to happen that way.

Sometimes you just have a terrible month. Sometimes you lose something you genuinely wanted, and for a while, your entire personality becomes complaining about it to anyone unfortunate enough to ask how you’re doing. You think about it while brushing your teeth, while eating dinner, while attempting to enjoy a perfectly nice afternoon. Even when something good happens, a part of your brain is still busy wondering how things might have turned out differently. It’s exhausting, honestly, and I wish I could tell you I’ve become wonderfully mature about these things, but I haven’t.

What I have noticed, though, is that time has a very strange way of changing the meaning of things.

There are experiences I once thought I would never get over that barely cross my mind now. There are people I was convinced I couldn’t live without, and then life continued, which was both surprising and a little offensive at first. There were plans I desperately wanted to work out, and when they didn’t, I genuinely thought I had somehow missed my chance at a particular sort of happiness. Looking back, I can see that I had attached an entire future to something that was only one possible version of my life.

And that is a difficult thing to admit. Sometimes the future we grieve is one we invented for ourselves, complete with all the conversations, celebrations, relationships, and little domestic details we imagined would come with it. We aren’t only losing what happened. We’re losing everything we thought would happen next, and somehow that imagined future can hurt just as much as the reality in front of us.

I wonder how many years we spend being convinced that our lives have gone wrong simply because they have gone differently from what we expected. It’s an uncomfortable question, especially when you’re young enough to believe you should have everything figured out already, despite having absolutely no idea what you’re doing half the time. I can spend an unreasonable amount of energy worrying about where my life is going, then remember that I couldn’t have predicted half the things that have already happened to me.

I think this is something we all struggle with in our own way, especially when life takes us somewhere we never expected to be. One of my subscribers, Neb, wrote about this feeling in an essay that explores the idea of things working out for a reason, and it got me thinking about how our understanding of life changes with time.

Their essay touches on something I think many of us have wondered about at some point: whether the things that disappoint us today might look different when we look back on them years later.

NEB’S ESSAY:

I struggled with this for a long time. I still do. But when I finally find peace with something, it’s because I found a way to make sense of it.

I think about the butterfly effect often. Change one thing, just one, and the entire outcome shifts. You wouldn’t be exactly where you are right now. Which means everything that went wrong, every detour, every door that closed in your face, was part of the equation that put you here.

That’s easy to say. It’s harder to feel when you’re in the middle of it.

So I give it time. I wait.

And then something happens.

Something small goes right, and I realize, without the one, I never would have had the other. The bad thing was load-bearing. It was holding up something I couldn’t see yet. I haven’t figured out how to apply this to death. I want to be honest about that. I don’t know how to make sense of losing someone you wanted to keep forever. That part of the equation still doesn’t add up for me. But for everything else, it does.

Eventually, it always does.

What I’m learning is that the proof rarely arrives as a lightning bolt.

It’s quieter than that.

It’s the child on the metro who throws their arms around their parent like that person is the only hero worth having, untouched by the world yet, still certain of who they love most. It’s your favorite song coming through your headphones at exactly the right moment, turning an ordinary sidewalk into the soundtrack of your own life.

It’s a small thing.

But if you stop long enough to actually feel it, you realize, everything that happened, the entire rollercoaster of the days and years before, put you right there, in that perfect moment.

Those moments are the proof.

And when you start collecting them, something shifts. They compound. They build momentum. You start to look for them, and the more you look, the more you find. And the more you find, the more you start to believe that if your dreams are real, the path to them is real too. That there is something mapping this out, not removing the hard parts, but threading them together into something that eventually makes sense.

Writing did that for me.

Someone once told me I romanticize my reality after reading one of my books. He was right. But that’s not an escape from reality, it’s the deepest way I know how to live inside it.

Writing about the hard things so many times has given me a strange gift: the ability to reach into something painful and pull out what it was trying to teach me.

Every time. Without fail.

Everything happens for a reason.

I know how that sounds. But I believe it. And here’s the simplest version of why: Think about love. Everything outside those four walls could have gone completely sideways that day. The world could have been chaos, and often is. But at the end of it, you get to lie down next to someone who cancels all of it out. Someone who makes you feel like a diver who has slipped beneath rough water into a world that is suddenly still, and calm, and perfect.

If that’s not daily proof of something, if that’s not destiny showing up in the quietest possible way, then I don’t know what is.

The success worth celebrating isn’t always the milestone.

Sometimes it’s just the moment.

The song. The child.

The person beside you at the end of the day.

Stop. Feel it.

That’s where the plan reveals itself.

I kept thinking about Neb’s essay because, honestly, I don’t know what I believe about this anymore. There are things I wish had happened differently, and there are things I’m glad happened even though I hated them at the time. I can’t explain why some experiences eventually become easier to live with while others still make me wonder what would have happened if I’d made a different decision. I suppose that’s what makes this whole idea so difficult. I want to believe things work out for a reason, but I also know how badly I’ve wanted certain things to work out and how little that wanting mattered in the end.

The part I struggle with is accepting that I can do everything I think I’m supposed to do and still end up somewhere I never planned to be. We grow up imagining that our lives will follow a certain order. We’ll figure out what we want, work towards it, find our people, and eventually reach a point where things feel a little more settled. Then life happens, and suddenly we’re questioning decisions we were so sure about a year ago. It’s embarrassing how much confidence we can have in a future we’ve never experienced.

I think about all the things I’ve wanted so badly that I couldn’t imagine being happy without them. At the time, I genuinely believed losing them would change everything. And in some ways, it did. I had to let go of the future I’d imagined, which was its own sort of grief. Yet I carried on, found other things to care about, and discovered that happiness wasn’t limited to the life I’d pictured. I wish I could say I understood that at the time, but I didn’t. I had to live through it before I could see anything beyond it.

And that’s where I find myself agreeing with Neb. Sometimes we only understand what an experience meant to us after we’ve had enough distance from it to look back without feeling exactly the same way. The difficult part is that we don’t get to know which experiences will eventually make sense and which ones won’t. We have to live through them without that reassurance, and I think that’s what makes life so frustrating sometimes. I’d love a little advance notice that everything is going to be okay. I’d also settle for knowing which things deserve my attention and which things I’m going to laugh about five years from now.

I don’t think every bad thing happens for a reason. I can’t make myself believe that every loss has a purpose or that every disappointment is secretly doing me a favour. Some things happen, and they hurt, and that’s all we know about them. What I do believe is that life can surprise us after we’ve convinced ourselves that we’ve reached the end of something. We can find things to love that we didn’t know we were looking for. We can become happy in circumstances we once would have rejected. We can look back at a difficult period and realise that, even though we’d never choose to experience it again, it wasn’t the end of our story.

I find that thought much easier to hold on to than the idea that everything has been planned for me. I don’t need to believe that every disappointment was necessary. I just need to remember that I haven’t seen everything my life has to offer yet, and neither has the person I’m going to become. There’s a lot I still want, a lot I haven’t figured out, and a lot I’m probably wrong about. I’d rather leave room for all of that than decide that one difficult chapter has told me everything I need to know about how my life is going to turn out.

I think that’s what I want to take away from Neb’s essay. I might never understand why certain things happened, and I might spend years wondering how different my life could have been. But I don’t want to spend the life I have mourning every life I could have lived. I want to give the person I am today a chance to be happy, even if the person I used to be wouldn’t have recognised this as the future they wanted.

For now, I think I’ll leave it at that. I still want to believe things work out for a reason. I’m just learning that sometimes, the reason isn’t something I can see yet, and sometimes the more important thing is finding a way to keep living while I wait.

About the Co-Author:

Neb

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