Life is not fair

Here we are entering the holiday season. And already circling the interwebs, people are getting strongarmed out of TVs, various electronics, and other heavily discounted Black Friday deals at brick and mortar stores.

Upon watching some of these videos of a gorilla taking a TV from their much smaller counterpart at a Best Buy, I thought to myself “what an asshole!”

But then I realized that I won’t ever know the context of what led up to that moment, or what happened after. Maybe the loser of the TV already had 6 TVs in her car, and was going to resell them on Facebook Marketplace at a hefty profit. Maybe the guy taking the TV from her had been beaten out by her on something else? Maybe they were both in cahoots, hoping that the video goes viral so that they get a cut of any interweb social media profits? I don’t know, and whatever was shown by the almighty electric smartphone eye, well, it never tells the whole story for better or worse.

For better or worse. Can’t fairness work the same way? Let’s look at the concept of fairness.

The online dictionary definition is “impartial and just treatment or behavior without favoritism or discrimination.”

Whenever someone says that something “isn’t fair,” it’s usually coming from a position of victimhood. Justified as it may be, it also has a yang to its yin. How?

Someone who works very hard to attain a life that very few ever dream of. Stories of immigrants who come here with little else aside from the clothes on their back and somehow defy the odds of American success, and then some. Stories of riches attained by such people.

If conditions are made so that success can be replicated over and over (like Kobe Bryant and uncontested layups), could that be considered unfair? Yes and no.

Using the aforementioned example, anyone who ever faced Kobe Bryant may say that if he had the ball and an opposing player was in the way of the hoop, it was pretty much known that Kobe would score on them. Not always, but his percentages certainly were skewed compared to rank and file NBA players now forgotten to mediocrity.

Kobe Bryant worked so hard at being so good that it did become unfair. But he put the work in. So yes, it was unfair that he was a 5 time champion and made ridiculous amounts of money in his career. But ask anyone who has ever excelled at that level, and they would say it is fair.

Is fairness a matter of perspective? Yes. There is nothing stopping you from attaining something that is “unfair” to the rest of everybody. Excellence at an unfair level.

What do you possess that is an unfair advantage? Take a minute to think about it, this comes with a bit of self-awareness. I’m sure there is something there. If you pour the gasoline of work ethic onto it, how high does that fire burn? When it’s broken down like that, it’s very easy to see how you can be grateful for something that is unfair. Fair to you, unfair to everyone else.

Pour that gasoline on it.