Life’s Not Fair. Thankfully!
Life’s not fair. It never was, isn’t now and won’t ever be. Do not fall into the entitled trap of feeling like you’re a victim. You are not.
Matthew McConaughey
“That’s not fair!”
This is followed by, “Their piece is bigger than mine.”
Children naïvely believe cake should always be equally distributed.
Of course, the lack of “fairness” only bothers them when another child appears to get more.
Children are not the only ones who play that game.
When we see people who have more than we do, we become jealous.
We overlook that they provided something of value for others to receive their wealth.
But what about those who were born to money, who did nothing to earn it?
We’ll return to this question in a moment. But first, let’s do a thought experiment.
What would life be like if everything were equally distributed?
Taken to its extreme, there would be no life.
If all the energy and matter were equally spread out throughout the universe, there would be nothing.
There would be no clumps of matter. That means no planets, no stars, and certainly no living creatures.
If all the energy were equally distributed, the temperature everywhere would be a few degrees above absolute zero.
Imagine the weather forecast, “Today it will be minus 454.756 degrees, with no clouds, no sun, and no wind.”
But the universe is not like that and won’t be for a while at least.
Without clumps of matter and concentrations of energy, nothing interesting would happen in the universe.
Let’s go back to those entitled brats who were born into wealth.
What do we mean by wealth?
We usually mean significantly more than what we have.
But shouldn’t we expand our sample size?
If all the world’s resources were equally given out to all the people alive right now, we wouldn’t be getting more.
It’s even worse if we include everyone who ever lived.
People say if everyone was the same it would be boring. That’s more true than they realize.
Without clumps of resources, clumps of skills, clumps of interests, and clumps of luck, there would be no progress. Nothing interesting would happen.
Instead of being jealous of those who have more than we do, we should be thankful for all we do have.
Instead of feeling guilty because others have much less than we do, we should use our abundance to make things better — better for others and for ourselves.
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