The Tower is disaster, and like any disasters, it is sudden and unpredictable.
It could be natural disasters like earthquake, or financial disasters, or wars. Things that take what you hold dear from you and make you wonder why it has to happen to you.
Usually there is no reason. You are not responsible for earthquakes, and you are not responsible when a random car hit your family member. You are just a victim of a disaster. You will try to find a reason for this so that you could accept the pain and move on. A popular choice is that you are punished for your sins.
Sometimes The Tower is about a personal disaster that doesn’t involve death, like getting fired, break up, divorce, or any traumatic experience that make you feel your old secure life is no more. It could be a completely inner experience, you may come to the realization that your beloved wife never loved you back and never will, or that you have spent so little time with your children and now they’re all grown up.
In personal disasters, you are not always the victim. A man might be stealing money from his company, then get caught and go to jail. It’s a disaster to him, but it’s his own damn fault. Or any disasters about relationship, no matter how you bitch about how this one hurts you, it’s you who decided to stick with him in the first place.
This leads us to another important aspect of The Tower: the disaster might be long overdue. A marriage that is dead long ago, or a job that you don’t love at all. It’s only a matter of time before that ugly divorce, or getting fired. The Tower means that now it’s time for you to face the reality of your miserable life.
I have faced such reality in 2014. I skipped most classes and exams in university, and in 2014 I came to face the reality that I couldn’t get a degree, I would become a dropout after 4 years in university. Yeah I knew it would happen all along, but I never thought too much of it before. Now I had to face it, now I had to ask what do I do after college, and how do I tell my parents?
Still I would like to emphasize that not all disasters have such a reason, sometimes you are just a victim. And, even if whatever bad thing happens to you has a reason, it doesn’t feel less terrible. People hate The Tower, people hate sudden changes and unpredictability, so they buy into the delusion that everything has a reason so that nothing would shake their world. Remember that it’s a delusion. Life is unpredictable, bad things happen, get used to it.