Kate Bowler
Hey lovies! It’s Kate. I am so thrilled to be able to tell you that my new book, Joyful Anyway, releases on April 7, 2026. This book is about being invited back to joy. And I mean the kind of joy that can live right beside sorrow and uncertainty and whatever season you’re in right now. It’s not a formula. It is not positivity. It the quiet, defiant yes to all that life holds. And if that sounds like something you need, pre-order your copy today. Oh hello, I’m Kate Bowler and this is Everything Happens. We live in a world that really wants life to be fair. That if you work hard enough, if you plan carefully enough, if you believe sincerely enough, things are going to turn out okay. And when they inevitably do not, we rush to explain it. We say things like, everything happens for a reason, or God has a plan, or this will make sense someday. This is like the core of my life’s work. I study these stories that we tell about success and suffering and what makes life feel meaningful. And I’m a historian at Duke University, but when I was in my mid thirties, I got a terrible cancer diagnosis. I was diagnosed with stage four cancer. And so everything about this really stopped being theoretical. I realized how much we all want to believe that good things should happen to good people, and just how fragile our faith can be when we find out that that’s not true. Today’s conversation is about what happens when we let go of the idea that life is fair, but we don’t let go meaning, responsibility, or compassion. I’m joined by sociologist Mark Rank, author of The Random Factor. Mark has spent his career studying how much our lives are shaped not by effort or merit, but by chance, by like the lottery of birth or timing or circumstance. Together, we’re gonna talk about randomness, responsibility, and what it means to live honestly in a world where hard work doesn’t always pay off and suffering doesn’t come with an explanation. You are gonna learn so much from his language and I’m just so glad you’re here. So Mark, thank you so much for doing this with me today. I feel extremely lucky to have you here.
Mark Rank
Ah, and I feel lucky too, so thank you.
Kate Bowler
I wondered, scholars usually have like an origin story, like it was at this one moment when we became obsessed. I wonder what your…
Mark Rank
Origin story is yes. Yes. Well, my origin story was about 15 years ago. I was working on a book on the American dream In the United States. This idea of the American Dream is very very important And so to try to answer the question of what is the American DREAM? How do people achieve it? What are the ways to do that? I decided to interview about 75 people in the actually in the st. Louis area and These were people from all different walks of life, from somebody who was homeless and sleeping on the street to somebody with over a billion dollars worth of assets. And I wanted to learn about the circumstances of their life and what they thought about the American dream and these kinds of questions. But something really interesting happened during these interviews that I wasn’t anticipating. And that as people talked about the twists and turns in their lives, they often would say things like, you know, as I think about it, If I hadn’t gotten that telephone call, or if I hadn’t missed that connection, or if this hadn’t happened or that, my life actually would be quite different than it is today. And I started thinking about that, and these were actually pretty profound. People at the time may not have realized that, but over time they realized there was a lot of luck and chance and randomness in where they are today. And so I started thinkin’ about that and it turns out I’m a social scientist, I’ve trained as a sociologist. In the social sciences, there’s very little research on this whole idea of luck, chance, and randomness. And one of the reasons is it’s very hard to predict and model. It’s random. So it’s hard to put that in an equation. But nevertheless, it turns out to be really important. So that was kind of the beginning of this. And as I started to think about it, it’s a fascinating subject when you think about how much in various ways luck and chance actually has a pretty profound effect on not only our lives but the world around us.
Kate Bowler
I think then we have opposite origin stories, because mine was the moment I realized that everyone thought that there was a secret conspiracy to give one reason for all things. And I grew up in the very middle of Canada. We have only one fast road that grows around our city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and I was extremely resentful that they put up a traffic light, like unduly resentful. And it was Sunday morning and it turned red. And then a factory emptied onto the road in front of me. And I thought, that’s odd and probably illegal to force people to work at these hours. And then I realized it was actually a mega church and that we were home to Canada’s largest mega church who had a pastor named Leon, who had just been given a motorcycle for pastors appreciation day. You might want to take note of the, and that he had driven the motorcycle around on stage. And I said very loudly, no, that is for Americans. And it turns out, no that’s pretty much for everybody. And so it turns that all kinds of friends of mine who are sweet, pacifist, cheese eating, Mennonites, furniture building, people of the prairies who should not believe in a God that gives them health and wealth and good fortune, we’re all attending this church and we’re really getting something out of it that I couldn’t understand. And so that moment became a question which became, oh my gosh, this is very difficult to study, which became an obsession. And then that was my youth. Your work on poverty really exposes how deeply affected we are by unseen forces. I wonder if you could just give me an example, like walking me through, say, the lottery of birth.
Mark Rank
Another area that I’ve focused on a lot in my research over the years is the question of poverty, particularly poverty in the United States. And a lot of times people, and I don’t know if it’s the case here in Sweden, but a lot of times, people feel that, well, that’s not going to happen to me. That’s somebody else. And I’ve looked at this question of what’s the long-term lifetime risk of poverty. And if you do that, actually it turns out that… The majority of Americans at some point will experience a year in poverty and people say well, why is that? Well, when you look over longer periods of time Things happen to people that they didn’t anticipate you get sick. You lose a job a pandemic happens and many of these things Revolve around bad luck That’s the whole concept of social insurance That’s a whole concept. Of the social welfare state is to protect people from bad luck striking And so what you find is that, sure, if you look at any year in the United States, maybe 10% of the population might fall into poverty, but over a long period of time, it’s much, much higher. And so that’s an important lens to think about luck and chance.
Kate Bowler
I just remember one aha moment I had in your book of like things that are more likely to happen to you based on factors you don’t imagine, like when you were born in the year or which year you were. Oh.
Mark Rank
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, first of all, just think about this, the lottery of birth. The fact that you were even born, the likelihood of that is unbelievable. And there’s so much randomness. Your parents had to find each other. Their parents had defined each other, their parents had, do you know what the odds are of that? Not only that, the sperm with your name on it had to compete with 10 million other sperm to find the egg. The odds of us being here are zillions to one, and one of the lessons which I’m sure we’ll talk about is that we really should be grateful for the time that we have here. We are incredibly lucky. But, back to your question, the timing of when you’re born, the year in which you were born, also can have a profound effect on the life course. So, for example, one case that’s often given is, you find that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, many of these people were born in 1955. By the way, I was also born in 55, but I certainly don’t have the millions that Bill, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. But people that were born at that particular time were at the exact right age when the technology changed, when microcomputing changed. They weren’t so far along in their career that they didn’t see it, but they weren’t too young that they couldn’t take advantage of it. And so it’s an example of when you’re born can actually have an effect on certain life outcomes. And that’s very much the luck of the draw. That’s very just the lottery of birth. But then when you think about things like our race and our gender and the class that we’re born into, those are things we have no control over. And yet again, it’s very chance and randomness. And those things do have a pretty profound effect on how our lives turn out.
Kate Bowler
I remember in the before times when I really by some sweet arrogance believed that I chose my life. I was reading a book by a sociologist, bless you, named, it was called A Century of Difference and I remember it describing classes, social classes by horizons where it said the upper class is largely defined by a sense of unlimited horizon, the possibility, the that they could anticipate things just right around the bend and that the lower classes were largely defined by approximate horizon and the wave after wave of crisis and having to meet it, the sense that things were so happening at such a pace that there wasn’t any time to do that sort of anticipation. But then when it described the middle class, it said, they think of themselves as able to navigate complicated institutions, that they are optimistic in their general ability to manage difficult circumstances, and that they can toggle between immediate crisis, but largely think of themselves as being able to plan their future. I was like, oh, jeez, I thought I had a personality and it turns out I’m just middle-class. Does it work? Do you think sometimes that- we can probably take personality a little down a notch in how we account for our resilience.
Mark Rank
Well, sure, and I think this whole idea of, which I know you’ve also talked about or written about, this whole of idea of meritocracy. And the idea, you know, certainly this is very strongly held in the United States, the idea of rugged individualism, self-reliance, you do it on your own, you’re able to achieve on your and that kind of thing. And when you start thinking about how life actually plays out and thinking about the ideas of luck and chance, life is not that simple. It’s not simply that people deserve what they get. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. That’s not the simple story that’s out there. It’s very hard to accept the fact that sometimes it doesn’t work out that way. That’s a very hard thing to accept.
Kate Bowler
It seems very clear in American history that their turn away from reformed theology after the American Revolution. So we have a whole stretch of the 1800s. The religious traditions that thrived were the ones that believed in individualism, were the one that were certain that God really only did part of the work and that it was a believer’s choice, a believer action that could really bring about salvation. And we just sort of, most of the reformed traditions, like Lutherans, you guys tried really hard in Minnesota and a couple other places, but it just wasn’t nearly the like, go get them, bootstrappy, Methodism, et cetera, that ended up really conquering. And especially in the 20th century, when you get to the rise of Pentecostalism, they had such a natural vocabulary for a God of surprise, a God a miracle, a God that could make a sudden about face. And what I find so lovely about that language is it gives you a real sense of spiritual intimacy that you can look through your own biography and not feel anything but the sense that God was there and there and behind the job that you got and the one you didn’t and behind a relationship that found you and the child that was born to you. And so it has such a tender quality to it. And typically, in religions of the city, it does very well with helping people respond to enormous risk. Cities are just. Shoots and ladders of who gets to the top and who falls to the bottom.
Mark Rank
And I also, you know, one of the things, actually a book that I’m working on is a follow-up to this book, is what are the lessons that one might take away from accepting the idea that there’s a lot of randomness and chance in the world? And, you now, there are many, many lessons, but, you, know, one that’s kind of related to what you were talking about is, you know imagine a world in which there was no chance in luck. Imagine a world, in which it was, life was a fait accompli, everything was just planned out. That would be a really boring place to be. If everything was just, you know, A led to B led to C, what gives life its spice and its dynamic quality is that you don’t know what may happen. You know, when you wake up in the morning, you have a sort of a schedule and things will kind of play out, but sometimes they don’t work out that way. And that’s what really gives life a dynamic quality. So. I think there’s lots of things that we can think about that are really interesting to learn from in terms of thinking about the importance of luck and chance in the world around us.
Kate Bowler
Also, can we just agree that Mark is the sweetest academic in the whole world, that he brought a notepad up just in case he learned something in the moment? Like, how deeply humble is that? He’s like, I should probably write that down. I actually did.
Mark Rank
I actually did write something down. I know you did. I thought that was… I wrote something down, and what it was was when you were talking, I was thinking of some things. And one of the things that I emphasize in the book is the idea that, look, life is not all luck, chance, and randomness. Neither is life just complete individualism and agency, and we determine everything. What happens is there’s a combination. There’s a dynamic interchange. Between agency and and planning things and deciding to do and luck and chance and you might think of it as dance partners As we go through the sort of the our lives and sometimes luck and chants leads sometimes our Individualism and our agency leads, but there’s a dynamic quality and what’s interesting is how those two interact As we live our lives, so and that’s what I was writing down
Kate Bowler
We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere. This is my first time in Sweden. I got to go to Finland a couple of weeks ago and I’ve just been really struck by so much of the experience though, like experience of civic wholeness that comes from believing that there are institutions that can inure you from the worst kinds of. Public trust in voting processes, freedom of the press, for example, which feels more pressing day by day. I wonder how much these, like a collectivist mindset is really just like fundamentally at odds with these competing systems that are strictly based on individuals. Like someone said something really wise to me the other day, they said Americans value opportunity more than outcome. They just want to know that you had a shot and they deeply believe that everyone has a shot. Yes, yes. And it will make them much more tolerant to rampant homelessness and inequality of every kind. That’s right. If they just believe that everyone has a chance.
Mark Rank
No, that’s right. And one of the things that is a really strong value in the United States is the idea of equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. So the idea is that if you work hard and play by the rules, there are opportunities that you can take advantage on to make a better life. It’s not guaranteed, it’s not outcome, but it’s the opportunity that’s there. And part of that, again, goes back to the of the lottery of birth. Folks that are born in poverty are not going to have the same opportunities that somebody that is born with more resources is going to. And another thing that I’m actually working on is there’s a question that a lot of people have been interested for a long period of time, which is why is the social welfare state in, say, the Scandinavian countries so much more strong than, say in the United States. And there’s lots of different reasons. One is that we believe in the United States in rugged individualism and you don’t depend on the government and this kind of thing. Another reason that people often give is that in a country like Scandinavia, which traditionally has been pretty homogeneous in terms of race, it’s much more easy to feel empathy for somebody else that looks like you and to say, well, something bad may happen and we should have a more collective idea about that. Whereas the United States is a very heterogeneous society in terms of race and in terms of size, so it’s harder to feel that connection with somebody else when you’re in that situation. And that may be a reason why our sort of social welfare state and our programs are weak. But another one that I’m interested in actually right now in investing and looking at is the question of how much people think luck and chance is important in their lives. And it actually turns out that in European countries… Many more people are likely to say that’s an important factor in terms of income, in terms of outcomes, whereas again in the United States we downplay that. So that may be another reason why, for example, a country in, you know, a Scandinavian country tends to have a much more robust social welfare and safety net than a country in the Unites States, because there’s the acknowledgement that life is not all just, You know, rugged individualism. Sometimes things happen that are beyond your control, and sometimes bad luck happens. So again, this idea of luck and chance, I think is an important theme in terms of thinking about why do these countries differ to some extent on something like the social safety net?
Kate Bowler
How would you explain Canada then, which is like so young, so immigrant, and much more like Sweden? Maybe I should ask.
Mark Rank
Maybe I should ask you that question.
Kate Bowler
I just, I mean, I do think though, that one of our like philosophy of immigration is that because everyone doesn’t have a social, it doesn’t a family safety net, and this is out of the scope of my research, but one guess I would have is that the experience of being new will forever remind you just how precarious you are. I know that in high school, we used to have to, for multicultural day, we would wear these badges and all the whole, the badge was our like, all of our many ethnicities. But it was meant to remind us that all of us are one generation away from a story that was given to us. And I guess that sort of reminds me just how quickly we reach for explanatory that we all require to be storied by a country or a community or a faith. Yeah, that’s interesting, yeah. We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back. You had this one analogy that I just want you to talk about for a minute because it sort of exploded my brain. But I like to think as a medium smart person, not as smart as some engineers I met in the back, but as a media smart person then I can sort of understand a causal universe in which one thing creates another, which creates another and you can sort of create some sort of predictive map. But then you just describe the weather. And I would just like you to explain why the weather makes us feel insane.
Mark Rank
Is there anything, is there any group of professions that are more sort of… Mythical. Yeah, or more complaints about than the weather forecaster. You know, so we’ve come here this week and we have looked at the weather for the next day or two and it’s generally pretty good. But as you work out to three or four or five days, it starts to become very hard to predict the weather. The weather actually has a tremendous amount of randomness in it. Another example of how little things can really affect the weather is the butterfly effect, which is this idea that the wings of a butterfly in Brazil actually can affect the whether in the United States in terms of a hurricane or a tornado, and people have talked about that. So there’s a tremendous of random in the weather. There’s a lot of randomness in the natural world as a whole. One example is the whole idea of Darwin and evolution. And the way that evolution plays out is often by random mutation. And a random mutation that is advantageous to the species may continue because of that. But it’s a random mutatation that happens. It’s not planned, it’s random. So you see that throughout. End. You see that there. You see also in our historical timeline and what happens in history. And many times in history, a random event can bend history in a particular direction. I mean, I could give you thousands of examples where something very random happened that really had a profound effect on changing our history. So, you know, that’s another way to think about it.
Kate Bowler
I didn’t realize how emotionally I would connect to the concept of randomness until I was very, very sick and I met. I had written this op-ed, I was like, I didn’t think I would live till Christmas and it was one of those like, well, screw it, and kinds of moments where you just think, well, just say everything that occurs to me. And so I wrote a really, really sad personal story about what it was like to feel like I was dying in a culture where everybody had a reason and everybody was suddenly a spiritual accountant and everything that mattered to me was being lightly appraised. Well, how many kids do you have? Was it in your family? The sense that at every turn, they were just deciding how very sad to feel or not, depending on whether I could have known better. And so I wrote about how lonely that felt. And then I’d never been published in anything but like an academic journal before. And I sent it to a friend who sent it to another friend who had an editor friend at the New York Times. And he just… Published it and put it on the cover of the big flappy flap you get on Sundays. And it had a very big, very sad picture. And then because I’m dumb, I had my information at the bottom and a very easy way to let me know how you felt about the article. So I thought that I had written asking for people to have fewer reasons for why bad things happen. And many people instead read it and thought, You know? Now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I think there’s some reasons that I have for why you might be suffering, Kate. Thank you for providing your email here below. So I got thousands of emails and it was such a wild. Vulnerable way to experience other people’s stories about why. Some of them wanted me to understand that it was God’s sovereign plan and that God was just, God was just to let me die. It was also a guy who happened to have written it on the back of a bulletin, a church bulletin. I honestly, the way I pictured this whole thing playing out was like, it’s the middle of a sermon. He gets bored, he reaches for the bulletin, he thinks about something. I’ll just wrap this. So he wrote me this awful note and was so lazy that he didn’t even recopy it. He just put it in the mail. But lucky for me, in Church Bulletins, the pastor’s name was available at the top. So I wrote a nice little email back. Dear Pastor so-and-so, Gary and your congregation require some more compassion. Some of them offered the explanation that I, my life was. Becoming meaningful because now I could use this platform to explain to people the greatness of God. And if my life no longer had meaning at that point, then God would allow me a side door. And I think in living through the desire for meaning, I guess one thing I’ve always any malicious desire to sort of like purge an awful thought. I think that it just sometimes feels impossible to know that someone is suffering or to know something truly awful has happened and not be able to come close to some kind of explanation. Why do you think it is that we struggle so much as people to live with mystery or to live with contradictions.
Mark Rank
Yeah, that’s a great question. Why can we not accept the fact that there was just chance or luck involved? So let’s go back to the example of cancer. It turns out that in terms of folks that come down with cancer, and it depends on the type of cancer one has, there’s a genetic effect, there’s an environmental effect, but there’s also a very strong random affect random mutation within the cells that leads to, and many times there is nothing you could do about it. Nothing. You couldn’t eat a better diet, you couldn’t have, it’s just bad luck. But what we do is we want to say, what could I have done differently? How could I change? How could have stopped this from happening? And in some cases, there’s nothing you could have done. Now what that does, and thinking about the lessons of that, what that is it can relieve some of the guilt that people feel. There was nothing you could have done. So there’s something very beneficial about saying, let me let that go.
Kate Bowler
The guy who, in the middle of like the great, terrible trial time for me, I met that cancer researcher. He’s a man named Christian Tomasetti, and he’s this brilliant researcher at Johns Hopkins. And the research that he and a few other people did is going to earn them the Nobel for sure. But his question was, do you think there’s some relationship between… The rate at which an organ replicates and the incidence of cancer per organ. It’s just a simple, it seems, it’s simple enough for me to understand, but like skin cancer, you are in fact more likely to get melanoma than say, you know, pancreatic cancer. And so he applied, as a statistician, he applied the rates. He discovered that in fact these very small, slow replications of cells Create very understandable mutations, and that this whole third option opens up that isn’t environment and isn’t genetics. And so when the man who will get the Nobel for it just said, oh, sweetie, you’re just very unlucky.
Mark Rank
I felt so much better. No, that’s exactly right. I mean, there’s something about that that takes a burden off of yourself, that you were just, you know, it just was bad luck. And there are certain cancers in which that is more the case than other cancers, as you were mentioning. So it does depend to some extent. But back to your original point, why is it? That we can’t accept the idea that maybe some things don’t happen for any reason, you know, it’s just chance or luck. We have a difficulty, we want to have the story have an ending, but this story is a wide open story. But then again, think about it. If you accept that, there are many, many advantages and lessons that one can take away.
Kate Bowler
I think one of the worries about a story without an explanation is that it creeps up very closely to nihilism, right? If there is no explanation for this particular thing, then there is not explanation. And I know especially for the many of us that struggle with diseases of despair or have been very close to those who are depressed or anxious, there is a worry that if you pull that thread. On that sweater that all meaning gets stripped away, that all good stories are gone. And I am, as a Christian, I don’t believe that a mystery undoes all fundamental stories about God. Like, for example, I think that in getting up close to an experience of meaning, I’ve been working a lot on joy lately. And joy is so wild because it gets right up close to the absurdity of it all. Like when something really awful happens, doesn’t it’s just in like the dark moment really almost make you wanna laugh. But you just like hit that crazy feeling bubbles up from inside of you. And it’s the tragicomedy of it, all. Like you can’t even believe that this is happening. And I think that we have this ability. Inside of us to draw so close to the feeling that just the abyss of nothing matters. And then to be able to pull back, and like, I mean, in a story about faith, that we get to feel the great yes of a feeling created, of feeling like the goodness of our lives. And so my stories about this are like, mostly theological. But I think that you’re also arguing that real virtues come out of this. Like, you’d probably go humility. Oh, I was just-
Mark Rank
you read my mind. I was just gonna say I was thinking the word humility. I almost wrote it down here. No, that’s exactly right. So gratitude, humility, empathy, those all come out of an understanding of how much chance and luck is involved. So humility would be one. Look, I didn’t get here all by myself. First of all a lot of people helped me along the way. I had many lucky breaks that led to us being here, and I ought to be a little bit humble about that. And I think we as Americans, we often downplay this idea of being somewhat humble, but we should be somewhat humble about where we are. We’ve been helped many times along the way. The idea of empathy, of understanding. You know, maybe somebody in a less, you know, in a worse position with some bad circumstances had some bad things happen to them that they really had no control over. And that sort of helps to facilitate the idea of empathy. And then certainly the idea gratitude. I mean, the odds of us being here right now are unbelievable. And we, I think, should say we should make the most of the time we have here. We are incredibly lucky to be here. If you think about all of us being here right now and you and I being here. Best friends, two best friends. Two best friends Meeting for the first time. Thank you. When you think about everything that had to come together in terms of many different random kinds of things. I mean, there was a lot of that was going on here. It can be a very positive story as well. There’s a negative aspect to this, which is the nihilism, this kind of idea. But there’s also a very positive story that comes out of this. And it gets to that idea of wonder and things like that, and really saying, you know, wow, this is really amazing that this trip that we’re on.
Kate Bowler
I do think humility is such an under-appreciated virtue. I don’t know. I just know that the second I became an unlucky person, there were moments when I wasn’t humbled. I felt humiliated. And that was a hard… Because when it happened to me, I think my first response was like, Well, of course. I think when awful things happen, there can be, for people who, especially who struggle with like a feeling of self-worth, I had spent so long begging for care from doctors and being turned away that by the time that I finally got care, it was stage four cancer. And so I think by the I found out, and my first response was, of course. And that like that took me low and it has been I think it’s been hard for me to put randomness in the right place in my life, to somehow feel like worthy of the lovely things that come up, like worthy in like the way you feel when your kid looks at you with their ridiculous eyelashes, you know, like leveled by somebody else’s love. It’s taken me a while to feel like settled in how amazing it can be when an incredible thing happens to you.
Mark Rank
Well, I think another thing to go off of that is that one of the really big lessons of randomness and chance is the phrase, there’s always a chance. And what that translates into is, there is always hope. Because things can change, you know, because of all of this. And so there’s also hope. When you lose hope, your life is sometimes over. And so what luck and chance does is it says, there’s always a chance, you know? It might be a low chance, but there’s always a change. Why do people play the lottery? The chances are very low, but it’s the hope that made me all win. And that’s something that’s very powerful. So, and again, it’s a positive sort of thing to take away.
Kate Bowler
It just makes me laugh and the dumbest movie in the whole world is Dumb and Dumber, without a doubt. And the main character tries to be with this beautiful woman and she keeps rejecting him and he keeps saying, so you’re saying there’s a chance? And what’s so funny about that is I have this lovely friend named David Vaginbaum and he was very, very sick with an illness. And while he was like really in the last throes of his disease, he was trained as a doctor. He tried some, he experimented on himself with some off book meds. And he found the ability to treat his own illness. And he saved his own life. And now he runs an organization called Every Cure, which takes off book medication and repurposes them for rare diseases, which is an amazing life’s work. But every time he says, so you’re saying there’s a chance? You think of that movie. He is both joking about-
Speaker 3
Dumb and dumber.
Kate Bowler
And the fact that every now and then reaching out for that one little glimmer is actually the thing that moves you, even non-metaphorically, from death to life.
Mark Rank
Yeah, there you go.
Kate Bowler
So what do you think we owe each other then in a world that’s so shaped by chance?
Mark Rank
Well, I think, again, it’s the idea that if you accept that there’s a lot of chance going on, a lot of bad luck, it is the idea of, and you talked about this a little bit earlier, that we should all be in this together. That there should be sort of a collective idea that something bad may happen down the road. Maybe not to me, but to somebody else. And again, that’s the whole idea of social insurance. The idea that You pool your risk. You know, that’s what social insurance does, is it pools the risk so that when somebody does have something bad happen, the resources are there to help them. But you have to do that together. You can’t do that on your own. It has to be a collective commitment to do that and that’s kind of what the social safety net, the social welfare state is about, is having that collective commitment so when somebody does need those resources, they’re there. But it has to be that collective sort of idea. So I think that’s certainly one of them.
Kate Bowler
I do really wish that we could celebrate all traditions that are obsessed with interdependence. Because I think that right now, so I like to play a game called what heresies are available to you in your local bookstore. And if you ever play that game, please think of me, because you will notice that in any gift shop, if there is a spiritual interest at all, that about 80% of them will be some version of a blonde woman and a book called THE UNIVERSE. Thinks you’re pretty, or your mind, your power, your abilities. I was in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago, and right across from Universal Studios, this enormous film enterprise, there was a spiritual shop called The Universe Wants You Here. And it sold all manner of crystals and affirmation cards and and theologies of mind power, which became very popular really in the last 130 years in the United States in particular. But I always thought that ever since Americans became particularly obsessed with the idea that they had to do it on their own, what they all really wanted secretly was to be able to wrap themselves in a blanket of feeling like, even if they don’t know a person that can help them, that the universe will be around them. And I think we are just so hungry for stories of being held, being the never alone, never wasted, never set aside. And if we can’t find it in people, that we will gravitate toward bigger stories that assure us.
Mark Rank
Yeah, I totally agree with that. These ideas of humility, of gratitude, of empathy, I mean, it’s so important, it is so important. And we are just, you know, we’ve lost sight of that, I think.
Kate Bowler
Mark, I’m so grateful for the vocabulary that you’ve given us to just allow the things that happen to decide for a moment how meaningful it needs to be to take us where it needs go. It sounds like a little bit of acceptance will make us humble, will make grateful, might make us kinder, but too much, we might be sort of despairing and unable to watch great movies, like Dumb and Tumor.
Mark Rank
Yeah, and I would say for all of us to just remember to count your lucky stars.
Kate Bowler
Thank you, Mark. Chance and circumstance really shape our lives so much more than we’re usually willing to admit. And if that’s true, and I think it is, then success is never just earned and suffering is never fully deserved. And I hope that that is a very freeing thought for you today. I know it has honestly, it’s helped me still feel my own goodness, even when there’s no evidence that I… I’m the one in control or that I’m the one who can earn my way back to safety. Before I go, I just want to bless you, because it makes me happy to think about you adding up your days. And I want you to just feel the deep goodness that you are, even when nothing adds up. Blessed are you. May you be spared the burden of turning your pain into a lesson. May you remember that randomness is not a verdict on your worth, and struggle is not a personal failure. And when luck runs out, May you be met with kindness, and may you find small ways to offer it too. All right, my darlings, if you want to stay connected, come find me, I’m on Instagram, I do love Instagram. I love YouTube, I met Kate C. Bowler and I am truly having the very best time over on Substack because it’s not just an essay, it’s a whole community. So it’s just a website. It’s kind of like an old school blog if you’ve not been there, which makes it very user friendly. So if you never been on Substac, like come on down, it not hard. It’s KateBowler.substack.com. And this episode of Everything Happens was possible only through the incredible generosity of the Gambrel Foundation. This was recorded live at a gorgeous church in Sweden. And a very special thanks to Joel Haldorf, to Olaf Bowman, to Kristina Warnblom, and Maria Stor at Verbum. Verbum was my publisher there who published the Swedish version of Everything Happens for a reason. It just turned out so beautifully. Thank you too to Mark and Anne Rank. And to my team here at Everything Happens. Jess Ritchie, Harriet Putman, Keith Weston, Megan Crunkleton, Anne Herring, Hailie Durrett, Elia Zonio, Anna Fitzgerald-Peters, and Katherine Smith. This is Everything Happen with me, Kate Bowler.
