The 'Reason' You Found Doesn't Actually Exist
“It isn’t that you did something that caused the change. The change was going to happen anyway. You just happened to be standing at the bend where luck turned.”
I used to be really good at finding reasons for things.
My favorite takeout spot was amazing last week, so I recommended it to a friend. He went and said it was just okay. I told myself, “Maybe they swapped chefs.”
A while back I was watching a match. The commentator said, “This player crushed the first round—the pressure is going to hit him in round two.” A bit later he flipped it: “This one messed up round one, so now there’s no weight on his shoulders. He’ll bounce back in round two.” Both takes sounded reasonable. But he didn’t actually know anything. He saw an outcome and invented a plausible reason for it.
You’ve probably done the same thing:
You broke your personal running record this week and decided the new shoes really do make a difference—and then the next week you dropped right back to normal. You posted something on Xiaohongshu that went off, and you thought you’d cracked the algorithm, but your next post flopped. You had an amazing first date with someone, thought you’d found your soulmate, but the second date felt awkward and you spent the night replaying which sentence you screwed up.
Every one of those judgments feels natural. Every one of them could be wrong.
The real reason is: there is no reason. The good regresses down. The bad regresses up.
Statistics calls this regression to the mean: any extreme performance, good or bad, will automatically drift back toward the average on the next try. You don’t have to do anything. There doesn’t have to be a cause. It’s pure mathematical probability.
But we can’t stop ourselves from looking for a reason
The moment something happens, the brain automatically goes hunting for cause and effect. It isn’t a choice; it’s a reflex. The brain cannot sit with the phrase “no reason.” And regression to the mean, annoyingly, is not a “reason.” It’s just a mathematical fact.
The worst day of your cold, you drank ginger tea. Two days later you felt better. You said the ginger worked. But a cold gets better on its own. The worst day was the bottom of the curve, and from there the only direction was up. You happened to do something at the bottom; that doesn’t mean that thing fixed you.
You text someone, and they reply instantly for three days straight. You think it’s going somewhere. Day four their replies get slow, and you start dissecting whether you said too much. Maybe they were just free those three days, and got busy on day four.
You pass three rounds of interviews and feel invincible. The fourth round rejects you, and you spend the night replaying one question you think you answered badly. Maybe the interviewer was just in a flat mood that day, or someone slightly better happened to be ahead of you in line.
It isn’t that you did something that caused the change. The change was going to happen anyway. You just happened to be standing at the bend where luck turned.
Let Go of the “Why”
The world owes you an explanation, but the world isn’t going to give you one. So you make up your own.
But if we accept that things naturally fluctuate—the good regresses down, the bad regresses up—we realize we don’t need that reason at all.