Fairness. It’s such a fundamental concept for each of us, and we all claim to want life to be fair. Is it?
The answer is, as always, it depends.
It depends on what you mean by fair. Do you mean that you get what you deserve? Or that you get a clear path to what you want? Or that you get help whenever you need it? Or that you should get whatever you set your eyes on? To me, fairness has always been about getting a result commensurate with the personal investment you’ve made to get it.
So is life fair? Do we get that commensurate result?
It depends.
It depends on commitment. On circumstance. On luck, even. In our house we talk about the 80-10-10 rule. Eighty percent of the time we get what we deserve. We give a sincere effort, we get the result we want. We study for the test, we get the grade we wanted. We prepare for an assignment at work, devote time and energy without shortcuts, and we get recognition for a job well done. We prep the wall for painting, tape the baseboards, paint mindfully, and the wall looks great. Or we fail to give that effort, and we come up short. But the result is fair.
Ten percent of the time we give the sincere effort, but we don’t get the result. The teacher tests us on something that wasn’t on the exam prep. The data in our systems turned out to be wrong. The tape on the baseboard was defective and didn’t hold. So despite best efforts, we failed. This is where we’ve been screwed. And this is where we all say, “It’s not fair!”
And it’s not.
But neither is the other ten percent of the time, when we take a shortcut, when we blow off the work and still get the outcome we want. We seem to forget about these instances, where we achieve only because of good luck, when the test is completely on the one part of the chapter we read or when the boss asks the one question we know something about. Instead, we take those gifts as our rightful results, and we don’t remember them when circumstances break the other way.
So is life fair? It’s not always fair, and not always unfair in the way we think. It depends.