62 Comments
Jul 27, 2022Liked by Athena Walker

While it's quite true that life is not fair, there is a huge difference between (a) when a parent says this during an exchange designed to help the child deal positively and creatively with this fact, and (b) when a parent says this as justification for lying to the child, betraying the child, and in other ways abusing said child.

I personally experienced the latter, and it was devastating. It led me not only to distrust others and expect bad things from being honest with people, but also not to pursue what I wanted most in life because it would get snatched away from me where I least expected it.

Therefore, I think it's important for both parents and people who want to maintain positive relationships with other people to do their best to treat the other person fairly. It's like the Prisoner's Dilemma exchange. If we treat every exchange as a zero-sum dog-eat-dog situation where the only way I win is if you lose, then pretty much everyone loses overall.

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I had a tee shirt with the slogan, “Always cheat, always win”. On it. Few people got it

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Jul 27, 2022Liked by Athena Walker

Loved every word! The analogies of locust clouds and blizzards illustrating toughness of life were spot on and reminded me of similar stories in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. Great life lessons in those books. So very tired of the whining and entitled attitudes prevalent in society today. Life's a b***h, get strong and handle it!

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Jul 28, 2022Liked by Athena Walker

I would like to push back on this, Athena. I do happen to think society owes people something. We were here first.

As Thomas Paine said in Rights of Man: "Man did not enter into society to be worse off than he was before."

Society itself is a human innovation. Its whole purpose, the very reason it exists at all, is to serve human interests. But modern society is complex, and the competency waterline people are required to meet in order to have a comfortable and secure life and a respected place in the world is gradually rising higher and higher. Until very recently from a historical perspective, one could be pretty dumb and still be able to participate in society and live a reasonably comfortable life relative to the other members of one's in-group. In a subsistence culture, everyone has to be useful, so everyone is. There were fewer choices, but that was the human condition. The menial work people were required to perform was endless and obvious, but at least you didn't have to be unusually bright in order to have a place among your peers; in fact, collective cultures discouraged trying to distinguish one's self among the group. Self interest and group interest were indistinguishable, because without the group there was no self.

Right now, in our modern context, most people who weren't able to get a college degree are barely hanging on by their fingernails. Society got where it is today by systematically destroying the lower, simpler living standards of the past and paving over them with unimaginable progress, but the price for that has been an ever-increasing number of people who can't participate in the system and are disenfranchised by it.

Today, menial labor (and increasingly, sophisticated work) is performed by robots and machines. Your neighbor's 56-year-old uncle who has driven a truck all his life and is confounded by his smart phone is soon going to be replaced by computerized trucks that drive themselves cheaper, more efficiently, and with fewer errors than he ever could, and then he will be out of a job. What is he going to do then, go back to school and study machine learning to get an edge on the job market?

I'm not saying that progress is bad. We have more rights and luxuries today than a medieval person would have ever thought to ask for themselves in a million years, and we could still be doing and living better than we are, and we should continue in the direction of progress. I see very little virtue in struggling unnecessarily and as far as I'm concerned the problem is always the lower standard of living, not the higher one.

Still, society doesn't get to render people obsolete without owing them something in return. How many people is the system allowed to fail before we declare the system a failure? Let's ground that idea using real numbers. Is 100 people enough? 1,000? What kind of guarantees are we entitled to expect now that society has taken EVERYTHING for the sake of optimizing it?

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Jul 28, 2022·edited Jul 28, 2022Liked by Athena Walker

What really is "fair"?

It's up to you to decide.

As for me, this past year has been very harsh, almost the most difficult I've encountered in my life. No joke.

I just keep going, thankful I'm not in Ukraine or Russia, try to apply what I've learned from other tough times, and go on.

Can't remember thinking "this is not fair."

I also sleep a lot.

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Jul 29, 2022Liked by Athena Walker

I have a complaint to make here:

For whatever the reason, there are comments that I am not permitted to ♥️ in this thread, no matter how forcefully I press on the screen of my OnePlus 9pro. And you know, that just ain't fair Athena.

What IS fair, is that you have a good collection of sharp motherf*ckers commenting here.

Fairness is without doubt just another manmade concept that has no place in the natural world, which is ruled by 'might is right' and the law of the jungle.

Here's to hoping that we can manage to maintain this charade of fairness, for a little while longer

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Jul 27, 2022·edited Jul 27, 2022Liked by Athena Walker

I feel like there's a lot to unpack with the term 'fair.' It means a lot of different things to a lot of different people;

1. As Athena mentioned, that everyone "gets the same stuff."

2. That everyone is rewarded commensurate with their contribution or punished in line with their misdeeds. (And then we get into endless discussions about how we determine the value of a contribution.)

3. That people relate to each other based on informed consent. If you shake on a deal you follow it through.

4. That people get what they need and contribute what they can.

5. That expectations are met or traditions or laws upheld.

6. That people get what they want.

I don't *agree* with a lot of these standards, but they *are* standards that some people appeal to as 'fair,' so I include them here. And the standards with the most buy-in and popular support are those which give at least a bow of respect to multiple different standards. Social Security has popular support. It gives more to people who paid in more, but not in precise relation to how much people paid in. People who paid in a lot get screwed over a little. People who paid in less get a little more. John Q. Averagevoter, at least, seems to like this arrangement. Maybe because they think they're gaining an advantage. The complaint that things are "not fair" is usually not directed at uncaring natural forces, but at uncaring human beings. The threat is some kind of non-cooperation, and perhaps even violence. "Adhere to the standard of fairness or we sacrifice or degrade the relationship!" Often, it's an empty threat. When people reply to a complaint of unfairness with the rejoinder "life isn't fair" they're basically responding that the complainer doesn't have sufficient power to back up their threats, so they can go pound sand. A union might be able to organize a strike or a boycott, complain about 'unfairness,' and get some of their demands answered. An employee who hasn't been paid could call the labor relations board and cause some legal trouble for their employer. A 9 year old isn't able to pout sufficiently to make themselves un-grounded.

I absolutely agree with Athena's observation that modern life is far, far better than it was, historically. I'm regularly thankful for this.

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Jul 27, 2022Liked by Athena Walker

Beautifully written and elegantly presented: As always!!

I have given this subject much thought: I am incredibly fortune!! But I learned most of the wrong lessons. I have lived in abundance so long, doing dishes or going to the store count as "work" for me.

Thanks you for your insight into our very beings. Please keep up your wonderful work.

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Nov 15, 2023Liked by Athena Walker

I find the expressed views telling, but I wonder if the author has considered the following perspective: One can recognize that the world cannot be fair but simultaniously desire to make it fair (and value this desire). In this case, complaining about unfairness brings attention to percived sources of unfairness and thus could be used to combat it. This in turn could be reasoned to make the world more fair (or at least feed the desire for fairness). Is it not logical to continue complaining in this case? I.e. this perspective recognizes the authors claims but still values complaining as tool to achieve a goal?

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Jul 4, 2023·edited Jul 4, 2023Liked by Athena Walker

Life isn't fair, but there is also another principle - balance. Life and overall even non-living structures exists thanks to balance between components, between different forces, between mechanisms. That's what gave birth to fairness. It is seeking of balancing act that serves prolonging survival. It just musn't be taken for granted. It exists through continuous maintanance. And it is never perfect and there areseasonal ups and downs which are part of balance too. But without striving for it it will fall apart.

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Aug 4, 2022Liked by Athena Walker

The lack of care that the greater universe has for treating individuals according to their wishes is one thing. I'm not religious in that way either, while I might wish there were a fair great parent figure up there who will save us from our folly, I could never quite get how people can believe it.

There is the issue of fairness within human societies though; I take that as totally separate, and have a lot more complex emotions when humans treat others unfairly. Even if maybe we are just as driven by the interactions of molecules in our brains as a tiger might be that eats someone's kid, or the physics of a tornado that kills a whole family.

I also empathize with people who have horrible things happen though, and can emotionally relate to the *wish* for the universe to be fair and the sometimes intense grief that horrific events can cause. I always know it's just a wish though.

Different neurotypes, different reactions, strengths, weaknesses I guess.

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Aug 1, 2022Liked by Athena Walker

Good read Athena. Wish more people were as logical.

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Jul 31, 2022·edited Jul 31, 2022Liked by Athena Walker

If I offered someone 10 dollars to do something like "pull this lever" they would gladly do it and take the money. But if two months later they find out that by pulling the lever I earned 1000 dollars and the only way I could've done it was asking someone to pull the lever, there would be a good chance they would be angry. But what has changed? They still got +10 dollars. There is no law saying I should split evenly 500 dollars for each one.

Well, if the roles were reversed maybe I would have gotten angry, and the other person would point out "complain as much as you want, but there is another 23 people willing to pull the lever for 10 dollars" and I would not only pull the lever but I would say "oh, how life is unfair!", walking away 10 dollars richer.

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Life isn't fair and it shouldn't be expected but when we have the chance to make something fair we can go ahead and make it happen.

We can still thrive for more as a civilization with advancements of technollgy and science that will put us closer to providing people equalized opportinities.

And yes, we are lucky in many aspects indeed. But we tend to crave more. That's how even got to this point!

Thank you for the post! I like the reminder message that crying over smth not being fair won't do much necessarily lol. We have to ride the waves, as you mentioned.

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deletedJul 29, 2022Liked by Athena Walker
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