If there is one thing you should teach your kids, it’s that life is unfair. If they grow up with a psychological template celebrating this worldview, you’ve done 95% of your job as a parent.
Why am I writing this? Unfairness, of course. It’d take multiple versions of eternity to catalog the cruel vagaries of existence, so for now, I’ll offer some cider-addled moaning directed at The Less Talented and see what happens.
The Less Talented. This is a fairly blasé topic: people less talented than you becoming more successful simply because of the circumstances of their birth. In some circles, words like nepotism, cronyism, racism, and corruption wouldn’t be out of place, but if you get triggered and lose your head about this, you’ll only harm yourself.
Back to the unfairness of life. I can write this. Dang, you can read this. Hell, you ARE reading this! Whole load of unfair there, especially when you’re an impoverished genius having to rummage through garbage skips for moldy sandwich edges while some fat privileged paley is calling Uber Eats on his phone made with parts sourced from a death pit mine in some corrupt Conradesque African hellhole.
Yes, unfairness is the chorus of life. And sheez, know you’ll be trampled on again and again via the iron-cast boot of Unfairness, whether it be some mediocre, overdone-eyebrows princess fat-ass doling out distraction on social media, wrinkly reptilian mofo politicians wrecking the world with their egoic tribal circle-jerking, or falling victim to not being able to afford your food or rent because that’s what the psycho-schmoozy banker schmos want.
And yes, I’m not helping things. To start, I’m definitely less talented than some laptop-less writing savant out there. I’m wearing a shirt bought on a holiday to Thailand, a newish fan blows a chilled breeze through my bedroom, Blade Runner Blues plays through stereo headphones, and I’m seriously considering taking a long afternoon nap. I’m not hungry, thirsty, in want of anything. In fact, my only concern is how to spend the rest of the day without feeling guilty about my privilege bought at the cost of knowing how little I’m actually contributing to the grand human narrative.
Man, life is an epic comedy of divinely unfair proportions.