The Convenience of Blaming “Fate" For Suffering
Is it fate (or just other bad people or circumstances) or unexamined, unhealed wounds in your psyche leading you to the same place over and over again?
I recently wrote about the all-too-common attribution of life’s suffering to nebulous spiritual forces like fate or destiny (which, after some fun backlash, I later clarified!).
Carl Jung captured the problem perfectly in a line my friend David Sutcliffe recently invoked:
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Sizzling. In other words: until you do the inner work and examine your psychic landscape, the forces lurking deep in your unconscious will keep repeating themselves almost algorithmically. The result? You’ll mistake recurring pain as destiny, convinced you’re doomed to the same experiences forever.
A couple of nights ago in Vancouver, I had one of those painfully familiar moments at a social event. I won’t share the specifics, but I’ll share the aftertaste: I left feeling like a total loser, a useful idiot. Anger, sadness, and shame rushed in. The intensity of the experience scratched an old wound from childhood: feeling inadequate, undesirable, and repulsive.
On the 2 a.m. drive home, I leaned into the feelings, as psychotherapy often encourages.
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A sidebar worth mentioning: ChatGPT has become shockingly good at real-time therapeutic support. The newer models detect patterns in your thinking, challenge faulty conclusions, and even talk back (click the speaker sign at the bottom of the response and it’ll speak it to you) in an impressively human, non-robotic tone. As I vented into my phone, it helped unravel the psychological mechanics of my despair in real time, offered counter-narratives, and suggested healthier ways of seeing the night. It didn’t bypass or balm the sting with trite feel-good slogans — but it reshaped it and helped me see my own mistakes, which did feel good because I re-gained a sense of autonomy and agency in that experience.
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My raw thoughts on that drive home?
“This is my fate. I’m doomed. I’ve been here so many times before. Maybe the universe is telling me to just stay home and write instead of entering these Byzantine social hierarchies. I’m not meant for this. Other guys leave the night as glorious victors; me, I’m cursed.”
You get the flavour.
For nearly two hours, I marinated in this fatalism. But even in that rage and despair, a small slice of my psyche whispered: “This isn’t fate. This is an old wound, replaying again.”
If I had to quantify it, 80% of me on that drive was drowning in anger and doom, but 20% still sensed the deeper truth.
But aha, The Meta Mystic awakens!
(Read more here on what that title means if you’re new to this newsletter)
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By the next morning, after some restless sleep, the ratio flipped — wisdom and perspective had returned, with only a small remnant of fatalism hanging on.
Why? Because as the emotional uprising calmed down, I could see more clearly: these experiences don’t emerge from “the universe” conspiring against me, but from my own inner narratives. Earlier this week, a seismic insight crystallized after a few recent powerful psychotherapy sessions and deep self-reflection after: I often feel deficient in my presence as a man — not enough — and then I overcompensate through rhetorical maneuvers that can push people away.
That night, despite starting grounded, the chaos of music, bright lights, and crowded energy activated my old narrative of inner lack. I reverted to old maladaptive patterns. Could I have stayed more meta-conscious? Absolutely. Could I have operated from a deeper wholeness? For sure. Now I will keep this in mind for next time. Progress, not perfection.
Here’s the crucial point: these repeated bad nights aren’t my “fate.” They’re learned patterns, born of childhood wounds and reinforced over time. Absent any knowledge of psychology, therapy, or spiritual work, yes — perhaps these patterns would be my destiny. But I don’t live in a cave. I live in the modern world, with unprecedented access to the world’s greatest wisdom and healing practices.
There are no excuses (more on this in an upcoming essay).
The shadow of unhealed trauma and psychic ignorance makes us feel like victims of a dark, cosmic fate engineered by forces outside of our control.
- Rav Arora
The Convenience of Fate
It’s also worth asking: why do we blame fate in the first place? Why is it so tempting?
Because in the short term, it’s easier. Outsourcing suffering to fate, God, “the universe,” or even just other people absolves us from responsibility. If it’s fate, then it’s not your fault. You’re powerless, and therefore you can relax into helplessness.
But this is only “easier” in the very short run. In reality, it’s not easy at all. Because if you never examine the underlying patterns, you’ll keep replaying the same unconscious algorithm over and over, suffering needlessly in the same ways for years, even decades.
By contrast, the harder path is to take radical responsibility: to face your unconscious patterns, to sit with the pain, to trace it back to its roots. That’s the slow, grueling, often messy process of therapy, journaling, meditation, psychedelic journeys, and day-by-day self-reflection. It’s not a quick fix — one mushroom trip or a few sessions with a therapist don’t magically dissolve a lifetime of wounds. But if you stick with the work, it can gradually bear some fruits and life can feel “easier.”
The short-term “convenience” of fate becomes, in the long run, a prison. The short-term difficulty of self-reflection becomes, in the long run, liberation.
I won’t suger-coat or downplay how painfully difficult this process is. Despite writing this piece, I feel very much in the thick of some of these patterns right as we speak. Unraveling these patterns aren’t easy, but I see no other alternative to long-term well-being and peace.
The Primitive Appeal of Fate
Blaming “fate” for our suffering is, in truth, a primitive reflex — a stone-age view of life’s difficulties. Pre-scientific societies often explained disease and catastrophe the same way.
During the Black Death in 14th-century Europe, people believed the plague was divine punishment or the result of planetary misalignment. Terrified citizens whipped themselves in flagellant parades to appease God, not knowing the true culprit was bacteria carried by fleas on rats.
Likewise, in the Middle Ages, people suffering from schizophrenia, depression, or psychosis were often cast as possessed by the devil or cursed by fate — when in fact they were suffering from neurological and psychological conditions.
These examples remind us how easy it is, without knowledge or introspection, to outsource suffering to some cosmic force. But as understanding deepens, “fate” dissolves into pattern, biology, and psychology.
The Integration
One thing I want this Substack to offer is not just self-reflective narrative, but direct prompts for your own inner work. So let me leave you with this:
What area of your life have you consciously or unconsciously resigned to “fate”? What repeated patterns of suffering make you feel like a helpless victim, powerless to change?
What psychological or behavioral reasons might actually be perpetuating this seeming fate? How might you be actively complicit in keeping the cycle alive?
I recommend experimenting with tools like ChatGPT or Mindsera. Drop the question in and say: “I’d like you to help me unpack this as a therapist would.” You’ll be surprised how profoundly the thread begins to unravel, revealing layers you didn’t know were there.
The truth is simple but uncomfortable: our wounds masquerade as fate. Healing is the process of reclaiming authorship of the story.
Happy healing.
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Fate is at the heart of nearly every religion that has ever been except Judaism and Christianity.
The concept of fate is as polar opposite to the Gospel is CHRIST as it could be.
Take note: I am not suggesting it is polar opposite to the teachings of all denominations.
Despite all claims to the contrary there are denominations from cath to calvinist that accept tenets of 'fate' though they would never call it that nor admit to it.
Years ago I heard a story from a missionary in Africa. The women from a village was snatched from among her friends by a crock. The village mourned, wailed, and wept. The next morning the women were back at the river doing as they have always done.
The missionary was flabbergasted and asked the elders "How could they allow the women to go back there?" It was all laid off to fate.
No efforts to have men with weapons posted. Not efforts to fence and area keeping crocks away...nothing. There is not stopping fate ya know!
The concept of fate enslaves and kills.
I heard the story of a group of American men working their tails off to make a boat in the UK somewhere. The boat suffered a catastrophic failure at launch and sank. The Americans
Immediately set about to start over. They had the Americans come to a pub and they talked of the event. They said, (paraphrased) "Ya see, that's the difference between you Yanks and us. If that happened to us we'd just pack it in and go get drunk."We tried, we failed, go do something else". Over there they say, "It the hope that will kill ya."
In the Dune series there is a line saying "Fear is the great mind killer."
Fate engenders fear and even when it does not manifest as fear it is a killer.
It kills resolve, motivation, hopes, dreams, work ethic, etc, etc, etc.
The single simple and indisputable reason that it is, and has always been, the most Bible centered nations that outperform the rest is that the principles in that book destroy the lie of fate.
The nations that are the most backward and malicious are those that have fate at the center of their beliefs.
Have you looked into Cognitive Behavior Therapy? Used to it to get off the toxic mind meds.