On meaning, freedom, and the limits of our explanations for someone else's suffering.

A few days ago a two-minute reel showed up in my feed: a voice explaining simply, that souls choose in advance the lessons they come to learn — including poverty, violence, invalidity. The man on the street in the shot "chose" that life. I kept scrolling, like we all do. But the idea stayed with me.

Because underneath that two-minute summary sits work far more nuanced than any format like that can hold.

What's actually underneath

This work belongs to Michael Newton, an American hypnotherapist who, over more than twenty years, took his patients — through deep hypnotic regression — not into past lives, but into the space between lives. Newton called this work research and systematized the accounts of hundreds of clients in books like Journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls; they remain, however, material obtained under hypnosis, not scientific evidence of an existence between lives. Still, an internally coherent model emerged from these accounts: the soul rests, reviews the life just ended alongside wiser guides, then chooses — with discernment, not at random — its next body, its next family, the themes it wants to explore. Some of life's important relationships are described as reunions with souls from the same group, in roles that can shift from one life to the next. Difficult relationships are described as mutual agreements, not punishments.

And if his accounts did capture something real — we don't know — even that wouldn't mean the soul chooses every event in a life. It might choose a terrain, a family, a few relationships, a few themes. But a theme isn't a script. Between it and the life actually lived stand our own freedom, other people's freedom, history, and accident.

It's a coherent model, and — I think — a real tool for healing for anyone looking at their own life through it. The problem isn't the idea itself. The problem shows up exactly where the reel stops: the moment we use it to explain someone else's suffering. altcuiva.

Where the idea breaks

If I look at a man on the street and tell myself "he chose poverty as his lesson," something closes in me. Without noticing, I become less inclined to act — because I've already found an explanation that asks nothing more of me. But if I stay inside the same metaphysics, without skipping the hard part, a different, far more uncomfortable question appears: maybe his encounter with poverty isn't the scene's central lesson. Maybe the lesson is mine, or belongs to whoever near him is in a position to help: what do you do when you see suffering?

Suddenly the perspective flips. The man on the street is no longer just "the soul who chose poverty." My encounter with him becomes a question about me, too — do I explain him away, to escape the discomfort? Judge him, to feel safe? Avoid him, to feel nothing at all? Or simply recognize his dignity?

There's a fine but essential difference between searching for meaning and manufacturing an explanation. The first stays open, keeps returning to one's own experience, and accepts that it doesn't know everything. The second closes the question, so as not to feel its discomfort anymore. And maybe we don't even have to choose, once and for all, between a larger order to things and chance, cruelty, freedom, system — maybe all of it coexists, in proportions we can't calculate from the outside, especially when it's someone else's life.

None of this invalidates the idea that there might be a level of existence at which we take part in choosing certain conditions of our lives. But honesty requires admitting how little we actually know of the equation: how much we choose, what results from other people's freedom, and what simply belongs to the human condition — to the fact that we are vulnerable bodies, in a world of limited resources and imperfect systems. We can search for meaning in what happens to us. We have no way of knowing why something happened to someone else.

Four words we mix up

Much of the flattening in reels comes, I think, from using a single word — "lesson" — for four different things.

Trauma is the imprint left by an experience that, at the time, exceeded our capacity to process and integrate it. Experience is the concrete situation through which we encounter a given life theme — a loss, a betrayal, an illness. Theme is the territory that keeps recurring, in different forms, over time — it might be abandonment, control, belonging. Lesson — if we choose to keep the word — is simply what we become capable of understanding, choosing, or living differently in relation to that theme, once we've been through it.

These aren't synonyms, and confusing them has real consequences. The theme is not the trauma. The trauma is not the lesson. And the intensity of the trauma doesn't measure the depth of the lesson. The fact that we can turn trauma into growth doesn't mean the trauma was necessary for that growth. You can grow enormously from suffering without that retroactively justifying it. The difference looks small on paper, but it completely changes how we relate to our own pain — and, above all, to other people's.

Say the theme of a life is autonomy — the capacity to stay in relationship without giving up your own voice. It can show up through a parent who decides a little too much for you, through the difficulty of saying "no," through choosing a career against your family's expectations, or through an authoritarian boss. Extreme violence isn't required for the theme of autonomy to exist and be fully explored. If violence does appear, it intersects the same theme and can, on top of that, produce real trauma — but none of that entitles us to conclude the trauma was "ordered up" so the lesson could exist.

And if violence does appear, maybe what we're seeing isn't "the soul's lesson," but the meeting of a life theme with someone else's destructive freedom. The theme may be real — if we accept that hypothesis for a moment — but it says nothing about the intensity with which it ends up being lived. The same theme can appear gently, in a family conversation, or devastatingly, in a room where someone else chose to do harm. The difference between the two isn't in the theme; it's in what the freedom of the person next to us brings into it.

And there's something else that's easy to lose if we stop only at the painful part: sometimes the lesson isn't found at the theme's painful end, but in the capacity to live its other end. If the theme is self-worth, the absence of recognition may be what first brings it to the surface — but the process doesn't end once you learn to survive rejection; it can continue much later, when life finally offers you recognition and you have to learn to receive it without suspicion. If the theme is love, abandonment may be one of its experiences — but real maturing may only arrive once love becomes available and you no longer need to run from it. If the theme is power, powerlessness may be what opens the question — but the lesson may only reveal itself once you finally have power, and have to choose how to use it. The theme, in other words, is larger than the trauma, that, sometimes brings it to the surface.

The system, the conditioning, and what remains ours

Here it's worth bringing in a name that's less spiritual but far more rigorous: Murray Bowen, the American psychiatrist who laid the foundations of family systems theory. Bowen didn't talk about souls or past lives, but about something just as hard to see from the inside: how much of the way we react — how we draw close, withdraw, grow afraid, or regulate ourselves in relationships — takes shape inside the family system and is transmitted, in various forms, from one generation to the next — what he called the multigenerational transmission process.

The system we come from gives us belonging. Its conditioning gives us survival strategies — how to ask, how to stay silent, who to be loyal to, which feelings are allowed. Bowen called differentiation of self precisely the capacity to see this automatic pattern without being swallowed by it and without severing the connection out of reaction — to stay connected, while still choosing, in the end, what continues through you and what stops here. You don't need any belief in choices made before birth to feel the truth of this: it's a map of processes we can actually observe in how families function.

What no metaphysics of the soul can explain

And yet there remains a zone that neither Newton's framework nor Bowen's covers on its own: violence, war, chosen cruelty. Maybe here we don't need a total explanation at all. Hannah Arendt doesn't offer us an answer to "why does evil exist," but a different, more useful question: what happens to a person when they stop thinking morally about what they're doing? Watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Arendt was troubled precisely by the fact that the evil she was examining didn't wear the simple face of a monster, but could coexist with conformism, bureaucratic language , and what she described as a profound inability to think critically about one's own actions.

But Arendt also left a door open, one I find more useful than any spiritual consolation: the concept of natality — the idea that every birth brings something genuinely new into the world, a capacity for action that can't be fully reduced to everything that came before. The past conditions us, Arendt essentially says, but the birth of each person introduces the possibility of a beginning that can't be entirely explained by it. That means that no matter how strong the pattern — familial, social, historical — there always remains, for each of us, the possibility of responding differently than automatism dictates. The differentiation Bowen spoke of and the natality Arendt wrote about touch each other exactly here: both say that no matter how much the system we come from shapes us, something in us can stay awake enough to choose otherwise — what, earlier, we called "what stops here."

What remains, once you close the reel

Maybe there is a level of existence at which we take part in choosing certain conditions of our lives — I don't know, and I think intellectual honesty requires saying that plainly. What I do know is that, whatever the answer, the useful question is never "what did his soul choose," asked about someone else. It's "what do I do, right now, with what's in front of me" — the suffering child, the man on the street, the family pattern I suddenly recognize in myself, the bad news on the feed.

And maybe we don't even have to choose between the two. Maybe meaning doesn't always precede experience, like a hidden plan waiting to be discovered. Maybe, sometimes, meaning is born afterward — out of how we respond to what we didn't choose.

The two-minute reel has every right to exist — it's probably many people's first contact with questions worth living an entire life for. But depth doesn't fit into a short format, and we shouldn't try to cram it in there. Sometimes the most honest thing we can say about someone else's suffering is that we don't know why it's happening to them. And the most useful thing we can do is stay present in front of it anyway.

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