I stayed in my room the whole day, and regretted it. I blamed the weather and its lack of sun for it. The classic excuse for not heading outside. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised how naturally blame slips into our everyday lives. Small is mighty, and blaming something so mundane as the weather can actually hold greater depth of meaning. It’s small excuses like these that escalate to much bigger blames on ourselves, the environments we inhabit and the societal systems that shape our lives. In fact, there are times when the direction of blame is so blurred that I end up repeating what my colleague says frequently whenever something goes wrong, “I don’t know who to blame.”
There’s a scientist in all of us. We want to endlessly seek reasons why things happen to us and those around us. It’s all part of prolonging life and giving life a purpose. More notably, when things get rough we tend to blame someone or something. This is where seeking becomes hunger. Blame becomes our coping mechanism. It gives our suffering meaning - a value to acknowledge like the notion that we have to work hard in order to be successful. Perhaps blame is not really about finding the answers. Perhaps it is our attempt to make suffering feel understandable. The common blaming ground revolves around those perceived to have power or influence, celebrities or the government, for instance. Equally, we blame our inner circles of people, like family and friends without recognising that the control to change our lives is already within us. We blame the past as if it contains fixed beliefs, cultures and norms - you could say that is normal behaviour for humans who are inherently cultural beings. ‘It’s all your fault’ is an accusative finger-pointing clause that becomes the rhetoric to this blame game.
Many of our beliefs become inherited before they are examined. We forget that we don’t have to live by the past or the influence of others, to live a meaningful life. We are creative beings and have the capacity to adapt to suit our needs of ‘the time’ we live in. In a broader sense our behaviours develop from inherited narratives brought by our parents, then from school, our friend circles and beyond. It’s our differing beliefs in religion, culture and politics that create the division resulting in confusion about what’s right or wrong. We didn’t choose to live the life we’re in but we can choose how to lead it. Synonymous to every religious, political and cultural debate is to look at the cause of the problem, talk it out and then resolve it.
A case that sparked my thinking on this topic was the debate surrounding Congenital Zika Syndrome in Colombia. During the Zika virus outbreak, pregnant women who became infected faced an increased risk of giving birth to babies with serious development impairments, including visual, hearing, motor and cognitive difficulties. The medical cause was relatively clear: a mosquito-borne virus. Yet the social response buried the cause in complexity. Disability, which is the common term used for impairment, is often interpreted though the lens of culture, religion and morality. In moments of uncertainty, people seek explanations that extend beyond medicine alone. Some viewed this disability as a challenge given by God while others blamed the parents for their “sins”. In doing so, attention shifted from the true cause to responsibility. This shows how suffering becomes entangled in these competing narratives. Medically the cause was a mosquito bite. Socially and morally, however, the story shifted to something entirely abstract - the need to explain suffering leads us to search for someone to blame.
When we think about the lives of others, we often project our own experiences onto them thinking it will alleviate their suffering. We assume that what feels right for us must be right for everyone else. Yet suffering rarely follows a uniform narrative. It is often through our own challenges that we ‘force ourselves’ to pause and reflect on what gives our lives purpose.
The more problems I encounter, the more I understand that suffering requires more than rational thought alone. We need the mind for analysis, the gut to guide us through uncertainty and the heart to channel empathy. Our emotions remind us that no experience of suffering is the same, though it is universal to the human experience. If this is true, then the vital question here is not who to blame, but what we can learn. Sometimes we go through various challenges not because life is unfair or Mother Nature has favourites. Sometimes it teaches us valuable lessons that help us to guide others with similar struggles. Surely if we truly love those around us, we should make their lives easier than our own.
Stories, much like culture itself, are passed from one generation to the next. When we share our experiences, suffering becomes more manageable and resilience becomes contagious. Humans are dependent on each other, not on systems alone. And if we want to change those systems, we must first change our attitudes towards suffering. That begins with honest conversations and a willingness to understand what really caused the suffering in the first place.
