“You just received a raise? Well, congratulations! I think you deserved it.” A co-worker, named Dawn, said after I stepped out of a one-on-one with my boss. I was so proud that I almost missed her tripping on my pet peeve.

“Well, thank you for those kind words,” I said with all sincerity, “but I didn’t deserve that raise. I earned it.” 

I don’t know if I offended Helen, but she obviously felt the need to correct my correction, “If you earned a raise, then we all did,” she said, emphasizing the word earned in the exact same way I did, in a subtle form of mockery.

“We all got a raise,” she clarified, “but it wasn’t a raise in the way you think it was. It was a bump in pay. Yeah, the feds just upped the minimum wage, so we all received a commensurate bump in pay.”

I read about the raise in the minimum wage, but I made more than the minimum wage, so I didn’t think those stories concerned me. I knew the cost of everything would rise accordingly, and I knew every dollar I had in my pocket would mean less as a result of the minimum wage hike, but I didn’t think it would affect me in any other way. I didn’t know anything about the general practice companies have of raising wages to help their employees’ keep pace with the inflation that results from raising the minimum wage.

In our one-on-one, my boss led me to believe my raise was based on merit. He never said the word raise, I realized in the aftermath of Helen’s clarification, but he said enough to allow me to fill in the blank. I was so proud of that raise that I couldn’t wait to tell my dad. It turned out this bump in pay wasn’t an amount of money I earned, but money I deserved for working in a country that decided to mandate that employers pay their employees more money.

“Why do you care whether you earned or deserved more money?” another co-worker, named Natalie later asked, “as long as you have more of it in the bank.”

Other co-workers told me to shut up in various other ways, and that I should be grateful to have a job. I tried to be that guy, as I knew the pain of being laid off, fired and unemployed. I don’t know if my state of mind had something to do with my boss delivering the news of my bump in pay under what I considered false pretenses, but I thought it had something to do with the overwhelming sense of pride I felt when I thought the company was finally recognizing all of my hard work, and how that all came crashing down when I realized I deserved it.

Earn It!

In a post-game interview, following his first 1994-1995 national championship, former Nebraska Cornhuskers head coach Tom Osborne was asked if he felt he deserved the title. Tom Osborne began head coaching duties in 1974. What followed was a level of consistency almost unheard of in college football, with numerous near-misses in national championship games. No college coach, at the time, could be said to be more deserving of a national championship. No college coach worked harder, or was more effective in building a system that produced a consistent winner, at the time, than Coach Tom Osborne. Yet when he finally won his first championship, and someone asked him if he felt he deserved it, he said, “No one deserves a national championship,” I write paraphrasing Coach Osborne. “You win one in that particular season.” Without going into too much detail, every loss to the Oklahoma Sooners, every bowl game loss, and every near-miss informed Tom Osborne that he needed to adapt and change. The adaptations and changes Osborne and the Cornhusker hierarchy introduced have been listed by others, but one of the primary ones was a change in the type of players he needed to recruit to compete with the elite teams in college football. He knew no one was going to give him a National Championship because they felt sorry for him after so many near-misses. He knew he wasn’t any more deserving of a National Championship than any of the other head coaches in college football. He knew that he was going to have to change, adapt, and outwork his opponents, and he did to finish his career with three national championships and a 60-3 record over his last five seasons as Nebraska’s head coach. 

What’s the difference between the words earn and deserve? If a reader sorts through various periodicals they will find the two words used in an almost interchangeable manner. We conflate these two words so often that some of us consider them synonyms, and some thesauruses and dictionaries even list them as such.

This casual, but curious, observer of language would not go so far to write that those reference books are incorrect, but in a purely philosophical sense, I consider these words so far apart as to be antonyms. When the office worker speaks of deserving a raise she has not yet received, even those fellow employees who know the standardized measurements of the company would not bring up the word earn, fearing that doing so might taint the relationship they have with her. When a sports fan speaks of his favorite team deserving a championship, only his antagonists will mention the fact that their team hasn’t earned it yet, and when the lovelorn and politicians speak of the word deserving, it is an emotional appeal that their audience dare not counter.

Most define deserve as something for which they are entitled, as if by birthright, and earn has a more meritorious quality. They think they deserve to have something, as a result of a natural course of events. If another has, they should have. In this context, deserve takes on the definition of an adjective to describe those who should attain, and earn is more a verb to describe the justifiable reward for the hard work put into attaining a goal. Deserve is also a term used by those who feel they are owed something by being a good person, a human being who is alive, and they don’t bother defining the difference between the two as it applies to them.

All philosophical differences aside, this causal, but curious, observer can’t help but think that those who invest emotions in the idea that they are deserving, at the expense of working to earn, set themselves up for failure, heartache, and even diminished mental health when the reality of their circumstances continue to dispel such notions. One would think that, at some point, the confused would take a step back and reexamine their algorithm, but for most of us that’s easier said than done, as it could lead us to the conclusion that we’re a lot less deserving than we once believed.

LOVE

Love is difficult to calculate by standardized measurements of course, as past behaviors do not dictate future success. As such, no rational person should ever say that they deserve to be loved in a conditional manner by a prospective lover, but love is not something one can earn entirely by merit in this manner either. Conditional love, between adults, is a complicated algorithm fraught with failure that begins with simple, intangible superficialities. These superficialities can be as simple as the way a person combs their hair, their scent, the clothes they wear, the way they smile when they see you coming down the aisle at Cracker Barrel, and all of the other, otherwise meaningless intangibles that form superficial attraction.

Some could argue that the superficial nature of the early stages of love are nothing more than a crush, but a crush forms the crucial, fundamental layer of all that will arise from it. At some point, and every relationship is different, a crossover occurs. The initial spark that drove the relationship from point A to point B progresses into shared values, individualistic ideas, and some modifications on long held beliefs and philosophies, until it eventuates from that initial, superficial attraction into the ultimate, comprehensive, and conditional decisions we make about another person we call love. In this sense, we earn love every day thereafter by maintaining and managing the conditions that the other party lays out for us in overt and implicit ways to form adult, conditional love.

“Do you think you should receive love simply by being?” I would ask those who claim to deserve love. “Do you think that you should be able to walk up to a total stranger on the street and inform them that you are a good person, and therefore deserving of love, and that they should do their civic duty, as a good citizen of the world, and love you? If that’s what you believe, you’ll probably end up with the type of love you deserve.” 

The point is that those who claim they’ve achieved the quality of deserving open up a whole can of why, for those who are asked to believe it. ‘Why do I deserve,’ should be the first question we ask ourselves, and ‘why am I more deserving than another?’ should be the next, and all of the answers should culminate in self-evident facts and figures that result in the definitions of the words ‘merit’ and ‘earn’.

High-minded types who tend to overthink matters are often the first to warn the rest of us that we overthink matters. One such person told his audience that love is nothing more than a complex mixture of chemicals in the brain, and he did so under a theoretical umbrella that suggests that a human being is no more complex than a penguin. This person added that other animals, like some penguins, maintain long-term, monogamous relationships based on some decision-making. The rest of us would not say that this is outright false, but we would add that the definition of love can vary with the complex and simple variables we add to it. If we want the love we deserve to be no more complex than the penguin’s, and our drive to be loved, and love, is nothing more than a natural and primal need to procreate, then humans deserve to be loved by the primal, prospective mate who senses when we’re in heat. If our senses are inferior to the penguin’s, in the sense that we can’t tell when a prospective mate is in heat, we may want to develop a mating call that informs prospective mates when we feel ‘deserving’ of love to see what comes running down the alley to us.

Most of us prefer to believe that we earn the love we receive on a perpetual basis, a love that is much more complex than the penguins, and that the love we receive is reciprocated by the love we give. This, in financial circles, is called ROI (return on investment). Before we decide to invest our emotions in another, we try to make an informed decision of whether that person shares our values. We might make a snap decision, based on their superficialities, but this often occurs in the swoon stage. If they are going earn our love however, they are going to have to live up to our conditions long-term. If we settle on this primal, penguin definition of love, and we choose to believe that we deserve a form of love that should be nonjudgmental, and lacking in morals and values, and that which is nothing more than a stick that stirs the chemicals in our brain, the love we receive will be as meaningless as the penguins’, and what we deserve.