That's Not Fair!!!!

Yup... and?

*Apologies for not posting yesterday guys. Until further notice, I am going to be posting once a week on Wednesdays.

This is a favorite gripe of children, and my mother always had the best response.

“Who ever told you that life was fair.”

She was absolutely right, it isn’t. Guess what? Complaining about it won’t change that either. Life is not fair, nor will it ever be.

There is this immature attitude in society now that places a laughable emphasis on “fairness”. Everything has to be fair. Nope. Wrong. It isn’t, it won’t be, and trying to will it into existence is a waste of time.

This goes back to that whole, no one owes you anything, but it bears repeating because people apparently think that it owes them everything. Add to this the ridiculous whine of, “I didn’t ask to be born!” Seriously? No one did. You’re here, deal with it. Where this spoiled and bratty attitude in many forms, but it all comes down to the same thing, and that is a fundamental disconnect with reality.

You are not entitled to fairness. You are entitled to figure out your way in the world, but no one has to make that easy for you despite what you might have been told. I have another unfair thing for you. If you were told that life was fair, those people lied to you. I know! Unfair, right?

The notion of fairness, and that everyone should get the same thing is false. You don’t get the same thing as everyone else, because that is not how humans work. People want to believe that humans would all live in some ridiculous Utopia if everything was equally shared and everyone got the exact same thing.

This is not reality. Humans are self-interested. All humans are. They want to live, and are biologically wired to ensure that they and theirs have what they need, and if that means that you get less, nuts to you.

You live in a civilized society because that is something that has many systems supporting it. You don’t think about that because you just live your life and stuff is there. Do you know how many people literally have no idea how food gets to grocery stores? It’s a surprising number. Some people honestly think that their milk comes from the store. That is the extent of their understanding of where it originates. The entire supply chain is a mystery to them, they believe that so long as the store exists, they will always be able to get milk… because it comes from the store… They are about to be in for a very rude awakening come this fall when the food shortages hit.

People being so disconnected from how the world actually functions provides them this little pretend place that allows them to believe that they are entitled to fairness, and that everything will always be available to them because it is right now. Have you ever heard the saying:

“There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy” ~Alfred Henry Lewis

Or even more stark:

“Every society is three meals away from chaos” ~Vladimir Lenin

If you believe that life is supposed to be fair, you are not familiar with history. Nothing about history, or man’s journey through it is fair. It is brutal, dark, covered in blood and death, and heaps of mass graves because the dead piled up so quickly that there were no other options available to the living.

Do you know what this is:

That is a Rocky Mountain Locust. It isn’t a grasshopper, it’s a locust that was responsible for many people coming very near starvation in the eighteen hundreds. There were so many in the sky that they appeared to be a glittering cloud that blacked out the sun. In 1856-1857, and then again in 1865, these eating machines destroyed crops for hundreds of miles. They were everywhere and ate every green and growing thing that they encountered. When they decimated the crops, they left behind millions of eggs for the next hatching that would do it all over again. So many eggs that they couldn't be eradicated.

Why don’t we still see this locust? No one really knows for certain, but the theory goes that they were blown up into the Rocky Mountain high country during a storm where the entire population froze. They aren’t seen as a species anymore, not that anyone is aware of that is.

They aren’t the only ones though:

The glittering cloud that could wipe out an entire food supply for a nation. That photo is recent.

A few decades after the locust plague there was a winter in the Dakotas that was seven months of blizzards nearly every day. There was no way to get from one place to another. If you chanced going out during a rare moment of calm and were overtaken by a storm, you were in solid whiteout conditions. There was no way to know what direction lead where, and being out on the prairie, if you didn’t chance by a dwelling or a barn, you could walk into the middle of nowhere. Unless you could manage to outwalk the storm, you would freeze to death.

The trains that were the only means of bringing supplies to the towns were blocked by these blizzards. The railroad companies would send meant to clear out the deep cuts in the hillsides that the tracks ran through, as they would fill up with snow and be impassable. No sooner did they clear a cut, another blizzard came and filled it right back in. So pointless was the attempt to get the trains through that some were simply abandoned on the tracks because there was nothing else that could be done.

There’s a train in there, really.

Life is not fair and it was never intended to be. Life is not meant to be easy. It is meant to be difficult so you can learn to be resilient. Complaining that the world isn’t catering to your needs properly shows you have never encountered what the world is really like.

If everything is handed to you then you have no reason to strive. You have nothing to push back against, and you will have nothing to steel you into a formidable person. Life might be relatively easy compared to our ancestors, but that should not disillusion you into thinking that it is supposed to be this way, or that you are not unbelievably lucky to live in the time that you do. You live better now than the royals, and the richest people on the planet did just a century and a half ago.

You might think that is a pretty grand residence, but remember, there is:

No central heating there.

There’s no air conditioning.

There’s no refrigeration.

There is no modern bathroom.

There is no running water.

There is no hot water without a lot of work.

There is no wall-to-wall carpeting.

There is no electricity.

And that’s just the shortcomings of the castle itself. Think of having to go to a dentist back when that was built. Sound like a trip you want to make? Probably not.

Difficulties are not something to avoid. It makes people soft, and it makes them entitled. I understand that it is very easy to be complacent when things have always been exactly where you expect them to be, but that is an anomaly. If you lived back with the glittering cloud came, or when that long winter hit, your life would be work. Sun up to sun down, nothing but work, and that was just to survive. You might get Sunday off, but it wasn’t a day to go out and get drunk with your friends. It was a day of worship. You couldn’t even cook on that day. It had to be done the night before, thus adding to the work that was done on Saturday.

The next time you find yourself thinking that life isn’t fair and being unhappy about it, perhaps remember that you should never have expected that to begin with. Adjust and overcome instead of being angry about something that was always just a pipedream.