Dostoevsky Was Right: Not All Suffering Makes You Stronger

Dostoevsky Was Right: Not All Suffering Makes You Stronger

On the search for meaning and the limits of human consolation.

Thee Book Club

and

LN James

Oct 23, 2026

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23rd October, 2026.

Hello,

As I watched a child die on the table, a sentence arrived in my head unbidden.

Everything happens for a reason.

I did not think it. I didn’t come to it. It was closer to a reflex, the way a phrase surfaces when you are too tired to keep the door shut. The way a hymn you stopped believing comes back to you at a funeral.

It was obscene.

In a matter of days, the child would have turned two.

Two years old. A whole, even number, the kind parents say proudly to strangers.

At not quite two, a person is still entirely a person. They had a vocabulary. They had preferences and a way of refusing what they did not want. They had people they reached for. Things that made them laugh. A life already taking shape around them. Their family had dreams for that life.

Soon after the time of death was announced and recorded, the room went quiet.

And then, after a moment, we went back to work.

Everything happens for a reason.

Life happens for me.

During the years I was trying to claw my way out of something—to crawl out from beneath a heaviness I could never quite explain—phrases like these seemed to come from everywhere.

Your trauma is your superpower.

Your wound is your gift.

The thing that broke you is the thing that will make you.

I wanted desperately for those words to be true. For a while, I held on to them because I needed to believe that suffering could be transformed into something meaningful. That my pain could not have been for nothing.

But over time, I noticed that they began to land differently for me. Instead of feeling hopeful, they sometimes made me feel as though I was supposed to turn what happened to me into something useful, as though healing meant finding the gift hidden inside the wound.

If suffering is redeemable, then perhaps the person who has failed to redeem theirs has failed the test.

Every time I could not turn my pain into wisdom, ambition, resilience, or some beautiful thing worth showing another person, it felt like another personal deficiency. As if surviving was not enough. As if suffering had given me an assignment and I was failing to complete it.

The phrase made me angry throughout my healing, and sometimes it still does. Because yes, I am trying to make something out of what happened to me. I am trying to live well in spite of it. But that does not mean I am grateful for it.

Something was taken.

There is a version of me who was cared for instead of hurt. There is a version of my life that unfolded without certain wounds. I will never know who that person might have been.

It took me a long time to understand that making meaning from suffering is not the same thing as believing suffering happened

for

that meaning.

Sometimes terrible things happen because terrible things happen. And afterward, we are left behind to gather what remains and try to continue living.

This particular rotation I was on at work was tough because terrible things happened to kids. It is hard, if not impossible, to explain that away. And so, I could not stop thinking about the phrase,

everything happens for a reason

.

In

The Brothers Karamazov

, Ivan sits down with his younger brother Alyosha, a novice monk and perhaps the gentlest person in the novel, and explains why he cannot accept the world as it is.

He has been collecting material for the conversation. Not philosophical arguments, exactly, but stories. Stories clipped from newspapers and gathered secondhand, each of them about children.

A little girl locked outside overnight in the freezing cold by her own parents.

A boy of eight torn apart by his master’s hounds in front of his mother for throwing a stone.

Ivan’s choice of children is deliberate.

With adults, we are remarkably skilled at constructing explanations. They made a mistake. They chose badly. Perhaps they learned something. Perhaps suffering refined them. Perhaps, somehow, they grew.

Children destroy that logic.

There is no version of the story in which the boy torn apart by the hounds becomes stronger because of it.

And so Ivan makes his position clear: even if there is some final harmony, some future moment in which every agony is explained and every wound somehow reconciled, the price is too high.

“Too high a price is asked for harmony[…] It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.”

I think about the child. Almost two years old.

How do you look parents in the eyes and tell them their child is dead?

How do you explain that a simple accident has divided their lives into before and after? That a future they had already begun imagining has disappeared? That birthdays, first days of school, graduations, ordinary Tuesday mornings—all the unremarkable things that make up a life—have vanished with a person who had barely begun theirs?

There is no reason I could give them that would not diminish what was lost.

No lesson large enough.

No future good enough to retroactively make it acceptable.

It is simply cruel.

Cruel to the child.

Cruel to the person that child might have become.

Cruel to the family who will have to return home without them, to a room full of toys and clothes and evidence that, until that morning, a future existed there.

It is a heartbreak I cannot fully imagine, because imagining it completely would be unbearable.

And Dostoevsky does not really give Ivan an answer.

Alyosha does not defeat his argument. He does not explain why those children suffered. He does not construct a theology elegant enough to make their pain acceptable.

He simply crosses the space between them and kisses him.

For a long time, I thought healing meant finding the explanation that made everything hurt less. Now I think perhaps some things should never be explained away.

Perhaps the answer to suffering is not to insist that it happened for a reason, but to refuse to look away from the person who suffered.

To sit beside them without demanding that their pain become useful.

To love them without requiring redemption.

There are things in this world for which I will never have an answer. Maybe compassion begins when we stop insisting that there must be one.

Best,

LN. James

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