Editor’s note: This article was first published in November 2016, and its mention of cuts to science funding forcing researchers to abandon their work reflects the Spanish context around 2016.
Most people who think life is unfair have reached that conclusion in the same way: by comparing themselves with other people. And, to add a further twist of irony, those other people they compare themselves with probably also think life is unfair, because they in turn are comparing themselves with someone else.
First of all, and even though most people don’t like hearing it (and I’m going to repeat myself here), today you are where you have decided to be, where your actions have taken you. If you have a job you don’t like, it is the job you chose. If you are in a bad relationship, it is the one you chose. And if you are still stuck in a hole, it is simply because you decided to climb into that hole. You may even be digging it deeper by your own choice. But there is good news.
Life is a competition, but not the one you think
If you own a business, there are other businesses that want to put you out of business. If you have a job, someone will want you fired so they can take it. Someone at your company earns more than you while doing much less than you do. Someone with far fewer skills than you has been far more successful in life.
Someone has a better house than yours, a better car, more friends on Facebook, more free time for their family, and so on. There will always be someone who has more, and your sense of fairness in life will come only from comparing yourself with others.
And it’s true: in business, at work, in life, we are always competing. We compete in a job interview, our business competes with other businesses, and you should never stop competing, because as long as you are in the competition of life, it’s a sign that you are doing something.
But the only competition you need to win is the one against yourself. Stop comparing yourself with others for a moment and focus on outdoing yourself every day; in other words, be better each day than you were yesterday, but not as good as you will be tomorrow.
If you are stuck in a hole, don’t compare yourself with the people outside it; measure yourself by how much closer you get to climbing out each day. Don’t compare your income with your neighbour’s. Find a way to earn more each month than the month before. The same goes for your business: make it grow every year. Forget about your competitors. Make your business’s sales and profits compete only with last year’s figures.
That is the only way to measure personal and professional progress and growth. Keep getting better.
If someone is going to judge you, let it be you
Society may not reward you for many of the things you do. For example, a cancer researcher is paid less than a pundit on trash TV, a model or a footballer. If that researcher started thinking about fairness in quantitative terms, they would probably lose the will to keep looking for possible cures and treatments for cancer.
Fortunately, that researcher doesn’t compare “how much their knowledge and skills are paid” with what other people’s skills earn. Instead they think about what they do for society and for the world. We now have medical advances invented by people society has barely heard of. But when those people go to sleep at night, they know who they are and what they have done for the world: a world that has not rewarded them properly for their work, if we compare them with others.
In theory, society should reward a person according to the positive impact they have on the world, whether that means curing a tumour or risking their life to pull a child out of a burning house. In practice, it doesn’t work that way. We pay a footballer more or less 50 million a year, in one of the industries that moves the most money in our country, without realising that 1 in 3 people will have cancer in the next 10 years.
And perhaps the solution to that looming problem (the rise in cancer cases) lies with a kid who can’t afford to pay for his studies, or with someone who, faced with a lack of research funding and cuts to science, has been forced to abandon the research he was doing.
Ultimately, honesty and making a positive impact on the world are the only things we should judge ourselves by, even if nobody else appreciates them, and without comparing ourselves with anyone. In a world that has gone somewhat mad, the only way to keep our heads straight is to be proud of our own actions.
Why isn’t life fair?
It’s not that life is fair or unfair. Life is what it is, and it depends on our perception and even on what we consider fair. This is how life works:
Effort seems to be rewarded, but that’s not entirely true. At some point in your life you spent weeks studying very hard, but you failed the exam. An injustice to do with luck?
You put in the effort at work, worked very hard and got very good results, but the promotion didn’t go to you. Even when the time came to lay people off, you were the one let go, while someone who made less effort and got worse results was kept on.
You are a good guy, or a good girl, decent, honest, faithful, and you truly love someone, but that person doesn’t appreciate it and ends up rejecting you. Life isn’t fair? That’s life. Not knowing that these episodes are part of life gives us an illusory sense of fairness.
Why can’t life be fair for everyone?
What would a completely fair world look like? Everyone wants to succeed in life, and if people were given the choice, nobody would choose to suffer. But life cannot be fair, for some very logical reasons.
Two fighters step into the ring and both want to win, but for one to win, the other has to lose. For some companies to succeed, others have to fail; for someone to get that job, 100 other applicants have to be turned down.
For a man to meet the love of his life, that woman must have turned down other men, who felt rejected.
In a fair world, relationships would end only when both partners died on the same day at the same hour, and we wouldn’t see our relatives die either. Illness wouldn’t exist.
See also: Nobody wants to attend the best teacher’s class: pain
Accept life as it is
Death is part of life, and it is probably the fairest thing about it, because nobody escapes death. It reminds us that we only have one life, and that we shouldn’t waste time on complaints and problems that lead nowhere.
You will have good days, bad days and worse days, and the worse ones exist so that you appreciate the good ones.
You will have your heart broken so that when the right person comes along, you know how to return their love and appreciate them as they deserve.
You will lose your job so that you find something better, or unleash your creativity and skills by starting your own business.
You will have failures so that you learn practical lessons from them that will help you find the road to success.
You will lose loved ones so that you understand how important it is to give your attention to the people you love while they are still alive.
That’s life, and the ups and downs you go through are like the monitor in an operating theatre: as long as the line isn’t flat, it’s a sign that you are alive.
But there’s a problem: you want life to be fair, but are you fair to life?
After going through injustice in your relationships, where you gave and didn’t receive the same in return, will you know how to appreciate and reciprocate when someone comes along and gives themselves to you completely, granting them the fairness you asked for yourself?
When you fail, will you do yourself any good by falling apart instead of using the experience of failure to try again?
If you lose your job, will you unleash your creativity by getting drunk every day and feeling sorry for yourself about how unfair life is? At that moment, you won’t be being fair to your loved ones by showing that defeatist attitude.
In most cases, we ask for a fairer world. But are we fair to the world?
Featured image: DP Singh Bhullar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
