Why Do Good Things Happen to Bad People?

Throughout the ages, people have searched (often in vain) for the reason that bad things sometimes happen to good people. The reasons behind those occurrences are certainly worth contemplating, but today I want to talk about something a little less often openly discussed. We have all had moments of confusion when a person we absolutely cannot stand, whose every breath seems to make us feel ill has some wonderful (seemingly unfair) circumstance occur while we are piddling around waiting for our proverbial ship to come in. We wonder how such a good thing could happen for such a crummy person.

How could God, the universe, the fates or just plain chance take a shining to this nincompoop jerk who lies, cheats and bamboozles his or her way through life? No matter your belief structure, it just doesn’t seem fair or right. This is a difficult pill for any person to swallow, but can be especially bothersome to an addict, active or recovering. 

You see one of our specialties is jealousy of the most rotten variety. It can and will eat away at us every bit as voraciously as self-pity or resentment. Jealousy enables us to feel bitterly angry without it being “our fault,” so it feels like the perfect crime. We can be so angry that some jerk hit it big that we are temporarily taken away from all our feelings and thoughts of inadequacy and self-loathing, and as such it provides a perfect vehicle for drinking and using.

The fact is that keeping your own side of the street clean is one of the first and only duties in life that is exclusively yours. As tempting as it can be to take someone else’s moral inventory for them (and perhaps even take the time to point it out to them along the way) it is the very definition of a futile exercise. While it may be temporarily gratifying to take a bath in someone else’s evil deeds, it does absolutely nothing to help cleanse the real source of anyone’s problems: your own mind.

Self-improvement and spiritual growth are first-rate focuses of the individuals seeking to build a better life for themselves. Put quite simply, you should be too busy making yourself better one day at a time to be concerned with what anyone else has or doesn’t have. Making sure you do the next right things every chance you get is all you need to be busy on any given day.

It is a fact that good things happen even to bad people, but it basically falls into the category of things over which you have no control. If you spend too much time worrying over anything that you can’t control, you will miss out on all the great opportunities for happiness that exist in every single day of your life. Be too concerned with making your life everything that it can be to have time to worry yourself with things that never were your business to begin with.