I recently had a frustrating experience with the contractor in charge of renovating the house we’re moving into next month. I asked him whether the date for a several thousand dollar appliances delivery was still good, and he failed to inform me until the truck was out for delivery that no one was at the house. When stuff like this happens, I genuinely experience great surcease of sorrow by reassuring myself that I’m a person with many bad traits and I at least deserve what’s happening. No religious or spiritual tradition I’ve heard of recommends exactly this to escape anguish, so I thought I’d write it down.
I don’t go through life in general flagellating myself. This coping mechanism would not feel healthy if I weren’t naturally selective about when to trot it out. I am complacent in my badness; when things are good rarely think about my sins. But when I start having the medium sized problems that are usually the biggest problems that happen to me, I review the medium sized ways I’m bad and go “that’s fair”. And thus life seems cosmically okay even if the immediate thing is pretty unpleasant.
It turns out that often there’s a vague undercurrent of “this is unfair” or “this ‘shouldn’t’ be happening” that’s magnifying the suffering – so assuring myself that I am in fact someone who deserves this level of suffering makes that undercurrent go away. It is more comforting than assuring myself, as would be more honest or realistic, that I don’t particularly deserve the suffering but it is happening anyway because I live in a chaotic world where all sorts of things happen all the time for hard-to-explain reasons.
My coping mechanism doesn’t rest on assumptions about gods or any external forces. The solace comes from thinking that experiencing the misfortune afflicting me is totally congruent with living in a just universe (whether or not we live in one). I find the feeling of living in a just universe very pleasing/soothing – it activates also when I see e.g. hardworking people succeed.
(This coping mechanism would not work on various huge catastrophes, because I don’t in fact believe I am bad enough to deserve huge catastrophes.)