Kate Bowler
NYT bestselling author.
“Any sentence starting with at least is typically a minimizer. At least you're at a good hospital. … I always wanted to push back of like, at least it's not stage five cancer. Like, when do I graduate into your compassion?”
Hidden Brain · Ideas & Essays · October 2026
Bowler sorts the people who responded to her illness into minimizers, teachers and solutions people. This is her description of the first group, who are sure that whatever is happening is not as bad as she thinks.
Transcript
Yes, I had a neighbor stop by, and she told my husband, Well, everything happens for a reason. And he immediately just said, I'd love to hear it. I'd love to hear the reason my wife is dying.
The responses to your illness were so consistent that you eventually divided them into different categories. And you describe these groups of people as the minimizers, the teachers, and the solutions people. Unpack those terms for me, Kate.
Well, the minimizers are pretty sure that whatever is going on, it's probably not as bad as I think it is. So these were at least, any sentence starting with at least is typically a minimizer. At least you're at a good hospital. I remember when we were in the earliest days, really struggling with whether or not this would bankrupt me and my family and my parents, actually. At least someone said you have the intellectual resources to deal with it. I always wanted to like push back of like, at least it's not stage five cancer. Like, when do I graduate into your compassion? So, yeah, at least minimizers are pretty easy to spot. The teachers want you to learn something that might save your own life. And it could be an emotional lesson. It could be a medical lesson. But that there's always, have I heard about, you know, drinking the blood of ducks from Albuquerque? Like, it could get increasingly like ridiculous, but there's just such a, in the face of this much pain and uncertainty, they need to hand you a lesson so that you can climb your way back onto the boat. The solutions people are upset that there is not more certainty and that you should be on a quest to really solve the problem of pain. And so solutions people are not going to believe that you've ever done enough. And they're going to want to hear you say that there's a new clinical trial that you're in, that there's like another faith healer that you're listening to or seeking out, but they will never accept that illness is likely something that's happening to you and not with your consent.
So I'm hearing a common thread in all of these responses. People are trying in some ways to preserve a sense of loss. And order around an event that was frightening in its randomness. Does that sound right to you as an explanation for these different veins of feedback and advice?
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. There's a genuine discomfort with that degree of uncertainty. And the immediate next step is to try to transform a tragedy into a kind of lesson or staging ground for some kind of next step. And this seems to me to be like a deeply American impulse is that there's no setback, just set up, that this can't simply be an undoing, that there has to be math here. This somehow will have to add up.
You know, one thing I'm thinking about here is the concept of a just world. This is described by the psychologist Melvin Lerner, for example. And he theorized that people have a deep-seated need to believe that the world is fair, that life gives you what you deserve. And in some ways, this might be a defense mechanism. You know, this terrible thing happened to Kate because somehow she deserved it, but I don't deserve something like this, so it won't happen to me.
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