the human desire to make sense of randomness

the human desire to make sense of randomness

featured in The Open Letters | by Khristian

The open Letters

Oct 10, 2026

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From

Khristian

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I think one of the most distinctly human forms of desperation is our refusal to believe that things simply happen. We are an animal afflicted with pattern recognition, forever dragging constellations between unrelated stars and calling the shape destiny. We name coincidences synchronicity, suffering a lesson, abandonment a necessary severance, survival a testament to resilience. Even when the universe offers us nothing but silence, we interrogate it until the silence begins to resemble an answer.

Perhaps this is because randomness is more frightening than cruelty. Cruelty, at least, implies an agent. It permits us to point toward something and say there, that is why. Randomness offers no such consolation. A person dies, a relationship dissolves, a childhood ends, a stranger becomes the most important person you have ever known, and sometimes there is no hidden architecture beneath any of it. There is merely chronology: one thing occurring after another, indifferent to whether we were prepared to survive it.

And yet we cannot leave it there.

We excavate our own histories like archaeologists of the self, searching for evidence that everything had been leading somewhere. We revisit conversations years after they ended, wondering whether a particular sentence contained some prophetic fracture we were too naïve to recognize. We assign significance to the people who arrived at precisely the wrong moment and became indispensable. We romanticize the wounds that nearly destroyed us because it is easier to believe they were for something than to admit they simply hurt.

I understand the impulse. Meaning makes suffering survivable.

There is something almost tender about the human insistence upon narrative. We take the scattered debris of our lives and arrange it into chronology, then chronology into causality, then causality into something resembling purpose. We tell ourselves that we became who we are because of what happened to us, rather than considering the more terrifying possibility that we might have become someone else under slightly different circumstances. A different city. A different stranger. A different afternoon. One microscopic alteration in the machinery of chance, and the person you call yourself may never have existed in quite this configuration.

This is why I am suspicious of the phrase everything happens for a reason. Sometimes things happen because the world is governed by an incomprehensible collision of circumstance, consequence, biology, timing, and chance. Sometimes the universe does not hide a message inside the wreckage.

But perhaps meaning was never something we were meant to discover.

Perhaps it is something we manufacture.

There is a strange dignity in that. If existence refuses to hand us a coherent manuscript, we become the authors by necessity. We decide what the grave means. We decide what the heartbreak means. We decide whether the years we thought were wasted were actually evidence of endurance. We take randomness—the primordial terror of things happening without permission or explanation—and impose language upon it.

Maybe that is not delusion.

Maybe it is how we remain human.

About the Author:

khristian is a transmasculine writer and multidisciplinary writer born in virginia, usa. a jack of trades individual who has traveled across four countries, his work is shaped by an enduring fascination with displacement, identity, memory, and the ways unfamiliar places can alter the architecture of a person. his writing moves between literary analysis, poetry, prose, mythology, cinema, and personal narrative, often blurring the boundary between criticism and confession. influenced by franz kafka, friedrich nietzsche, albert camus, and ocean vuong, he writes through existentialism, romanticism, inner darkness, and human contradiction. khristian is less interested in answering questions than excavating the ones people carry quietly—those buried beneath grief, love, attachment, loss, desire, and becoming. he writes from the belief that language can be both an autopsy and an act of preservation, transforming the fragments of his journals, memories, and experiences into literature.

Substack ID:

Khristian

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