The problem I have with overly optimistic philosophies is that it seems to discount the seriousness of human suffering. I mean, seriously, try getting someone who, after 10 grueling years of intensive chemo, followed by an equally grueling course of bone marrow transplant complicated by graft-vs-host disease, just had a relapse of leukemia—try getting them to watch “The Secret” and see how perverse and even insulting that is.

I am suddenly reminded of Pangloss from Candide, and his tripe about “the best of all possible worlds.”

This is not to say that suffering ought to not exist. It’s just part and parcel of the human condition. The inability to feel pain is in itself a disadvantage. Think about diabetic neuropathy or leprosy, where your nerves are all burnt out and you might not even notice that you injured yourself until the wound gets infected and now they’re talking about cutting your limbs off. Think about autistic kids, some of whom literally cannot experience suffering, and ask yourself if you’d want to be in their place.

But to try to find a positive meaning even in the worst, most arbitrary forms of suffering, I think, trivializes the suffering, and I’m not sure that’s an honest way to go. I mean, seriously, are you going to tell the parents of a two year old who has incurable cancer that there’s a positive reason why their two year old is going through this, that there’s a positive reason why their two year old has to die?

My take is that a lot of times (but not always), the universe can be a hostile place, and lots of bad things happen for no good reason whatsoever. I mean, think about it. From what we know of the universe, most of it is completely inimical to life. We’re stuck on this rock orbiting an unremarkable yellow-green star in the middle of nowhere. Anywhere else in the vicinity of a million miles, and you’re sucking on vacuum and exploding, for the most part.

The Western (and often peculiarly American) philosophies that advocate the end of suffering all have this delusion that we deserve to be happy. But the universe owes us nothing. In contrast, while Buddhism, on the surface, also advocates the end of suffering, it does so in a more honest way. Suffering continues to occur, but you train yourself to deal with it, until it is no longer suffering. But enlightenment is an upward battle, a striving against the forces of entropy. You do not get enlightenment for free. And no one can give you enlightenment.

So be careful whom you’re around when you say that everything happens for a reason. This may be true in a basic causality-based framework (every action has a preceding action responsible for it), but to ascribe benign intentionality to the most awful of human suffering is simply sick and wrong.