Life is sometimes painful, often unfair, perhaps always absurd, but it is not tragic. The word tragedy implied that there’s a moral significance to a disastrous ending and that the victim has somehow caused his or her own downfall. The words tragedy and tragic are used so often and so loosely that they seem to describe what are really universal human experiences of undeserved calamity.
Someone dies young; an adult is killed while trying to rescue a trapped child; innocent bystanders are killed at the scene of a crime. We shake our heads sadly and declare, “What a tragedy!”
If we view all life and death as tragic, then we believe ourselves to be victims doomed to meet unhappy endings as a result of our own flaws. This may be what happens in the end, but life is not a play and a tragic conclusion is not inevitable. If we want to live life, rather than just play at it, we must choose our own roles and avoid casting ourselves in a tragedy.
When we stop exaggerating the importance of our problems, we’ll be left with no more than an ordinary share of unhappiness.