You can scare yourself silly learning what happens when peoples’ faith in the meaningfulness of their world is disrupted by random events. “In 20 years of studying the reactions of trauma survivors, the phrase I heard most often was: ‘I never thought it could happen to me,’” said the social psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman. No wonder she titled her book Shattered Assumptions. One of the greatest psychologists of the 20th century, Albert Bandura, challenged his colleagues to move beyond explanations of human development that made intuitive sense and face the fact that a lot of unrecognized randomness also plays a role in how people’s lives develop. Even the random events we do recognize and think we can control, Bandura pointed out, interact with other random events we may not see. Furthermore, they do so in a way that’s random in itself. You may think it makes a funny story to tell people how you met your spouse who happened to be sitting next to you on a plane—but what about the fact that you both happened to be good enough conversationalists to do something with that chance meeting? Randomness shaped by more randomness. Some of us may not have the courage for this much insight.
Meantime, people go on thinking the way they’ve always thought. Knowing more about randomness, including this brief tasting menu of discoveries, probably won’t change your attitudes toward it including fear, possibly because there’s seemingly so little to know. Theories about randomness and the statistical tools used to tame it—somewhat—still do not change its essential nature. Whatever it really is, it haunts our existence, like the dark forest full of strange things just beyond our campfire. It never goes away, always lurking outside the bright light of our efforts to give our lives purpose and direction, so formless that we have no choice but to tell a story about it. There’s something intoxicating as well as scary about that. If you take just enough edge off the scariness to make it entertaining, you might get a game show out of it.
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