You’re asking an existential question: why do bad things happen to good people? I would wager that this has been a subject of philosophical debate for as long as humans have existed.

Ultimately, I think it’s the wrong question.

What you’re experiencing is a form of confirmation bias. You expect bad people to live and good people to die, and that expectation is shaped by societal conditioning and the beliefs you’ve been exposed to throughout your life.

In reality, cancer, for example, affects a relatively small percentage of the world’s population at any given time, although that percentage still represents a tremendous number of people.

You’re seeing it affect people in roughly the proportions you’d expect. The problem is that the people you pay attention to tend to be the ones you believe shouldn’t be affected by it, while those you believe should be affected often aren’t.

We tend to perceive these events as unjust because we expect the world to operate according to some inherent sense of fairness. Unfortunately, nature doesn’t make that distinction between good and bad people.