“Life’s not fair,” I told her when she wouldn’t stop dropping these complaints on me. The thrust of her complaint was that the company we worked for didn’t administer their rules for employee conduct equally. This exchange occurred so often, between the two of us that she began to preface her complaints with:

“… And don’t say ‘life’s not fair’ or try to be objective in any way.” I still said it a couple more times, thinking that if I said it often enough she might see the logic in it. I stopped when I realized she conceded the point but chose not to see it.

That response was not original of course. I heard it from my dad so often that I probably prefaced my complaints to my dad in the same manner Ellie did. He said it as a standalone reply to my complaints, most of the time. Other times, particularly when referencing sports, he backed it up, “Unless you’re Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Tom Brady, or Babe Ruth, there’s always going to be someone better. And you’re right, it’s not fair that some are stronger, faster, and just better, but that’s life. It’s not fair that we have to work harder for everything we get in life, and that there will always be someone better. It’s not fair, I agree with you, but what are you going to do about it? 

“And don’t tell me that you’re going to work harder,” he continued. “Because I’ve heard that. I’ve heard it my whole life. ‘If you run into someone more talented that just means you have to work harder.’ I believed it too. I believed that if I worked harder, I could erase the difference and diminish the advantage. I’m here to tell that you that that’s just not true. Some of the times, you’ll run into someone with God-given abilities that no matter how hard you work, you will not be able to duplicate or defeat them. If you work hard, you’ll be better than most, all conditions being equal of course, but you’re always going to encounter those for whom conditions are not equal. Is it unfair, considering that you work ten times harder than them? You betch your buns it is, but unless you don’t mind banging your head into a wall, it’s probably in your best interests to accept some of the realities of life, and one of those realities is that some of the times life is unfair.” 

“You aren’t as good as you think you are,” he said after I threw a temper-tantrum after a particularly humiliating outing, “until you are. What makes you think you’re better, or that you should be better?  How much coaching have you had to hone your natural ability? How much work have you put in? Why should you be better?” There is this conceit that we all have that we are naturally gifted, and when we find out we aren’t, and how much work we still have to do, it can be frustrating. Learning the extent of our abilities can be frustrating, humiliating, and one of the hardest things to overcome. Sports illustrates this better than any other arena. As we watch those with God-given, natural abilities make it look so easy, we think, ‘I can do that.’ When we try that, it mystifies us that we aren’t as good as we thought we would be when we pictured ourselves doing it. It doesn’t dawn on us, initially, that the incredible athletes who made us think it was so easy are naturally superior, and we don’t think about how much work they put into to honing that natural ability. We just think we suck! 

On the flip side, when we see gifted athletes make their inevitable errors, we love it, and we think we wouldn’t have done that. We thought all we had to do is take the field, and we could accomplish what they do on a regular basis, without having to do all of the work that mere mortals require. We’ve all heard of exceptions to the rules, and we’ve seen those rare exceptions, and before we learn different, we think we’re one of them. Learning that we’re not graced by God with an embarrassment of riches when it comes to natural ability is not only frustrating and humiliating, it can be humbling, and kids don’t deal with humility well. We learn that there are reasons they developed the rule that it takes hard work to get there. Then, once we get there, we learn that it takes more hard work, diligence, and perseverance to stay there. If we fail to get there, as most of us will, we learn how rare exceptions to the rule are, because we’re not one of them. After experiencing so many failures to prove exceptional ability, we see those exceptions to the rule in a new light, and we watch them on TV with the sense that life’s just not fair.

***

Whether we’re younger sisters, the middle child, or just young, we often have to learn the unfairness of the world the hard way. The young spend most of their youth mired in the complaint that they wish they were older, so that they can participate in events forbidden to the young. We spend our youth wishing we were older, until we are. 

“You mean to tell me that just because I’ve been here longer than anyone else that means I’m old.” Yes, it’s called the aging process, and it happens a lot quicker than we think. It doesn’t happen as quick as the unfairness felt by the young, but when we finally make it to the top of the Monster Waterslide, it hits us. It hits us like a humiliating, emasculating slap in the face that everyone around us is forty years younger. “What am I doing here? Holy crap, I’m old!” moments like these take decades to happen, but when they do, we’re not prepared. 

It was just, what, a decade ago, that that Monster Waterslide was a behemoth waiting patiently for conquer. It was a rite of passage we pursued for definition. “I went on the Monster Waterslide, and I wasn’t the least bit scared.” It turns out, we think counting, that that was nearly five decades ago. A couple years ago, we were no longer the youngest person standing in line without a parent, and we fit in with the rest of the teenagers. Looking around at the teenagers around us today, we realize that occurred almost four decades ago. “Impossible!” you say. Not only is it possible, it’s reality, and reality is unfair. A couple years ago, we didn’t care what anyone thought, we were going get nuts! People laughed when we went down the Monster Waterslide. We laughed. We didn’t care that some might consider us too old to enjoy a kid’s activity! That, it turns out, was a couple decades ago. And … what was it, a couple months ago, we were a little uncomfortable standing in line, waiting for our turn on the Monster Waterslide, and the kids around us were slightly uncomfortable, but we were with our kid. Our decision to get in line for the Monster Waterslide was about them, and we wanted to do things like this with them. We could tell some kids and adults thought it a bit strange, and we could feel it, but we were with our kids. Yeah, that was a decade ago. 

The instantaneous moment when we went from old to too old took decades to happen overnight, but it happened, when someone gave us a look that suggested they thought it was sad, maybe pathetic that we were still pretending we were young enough to go down a waterslide. When that teenage employee manning the waiting pool at the end of the slide, looked at us with a slight cringe that she dropped the minute she realized we were looking at her, we thought it was unfair that we couldn’t do this anymore without people staring. Even though we thought we made it passed all of the unfair complaints eons ago, we couldn’t help but think it was unfair that everyone was staring.

“Life’s not fair,” I told Ellie Stuart after her numerous complaints blasted through whatever remained of my threshold, and I thought I had a pretty firm grasp on the definitions of fair and unfair, until something different came along and reminded me how unfair it can be. At some point in life, no one cares that we can spell onomatopoeia, that we can conjugate most verbs, and that at some point it’s just expected and only worthy of note when we cannot. We’re old now, and no one cares what we can do anymore, and there is a sense of unfairness attached to that. Somewhere between being young and old, we switched roles and became the friend of parents, the uncle, and the dad that kids tried to impress. When we reach that point, we might be impressed by an explosive flurry of athleticism or intellect, and the kids loved it so much that they gravitated to us. They began displaying their athleticism and intellect for the sole purpose of impressing us. Try it some time. If you see a kid kick a ball go way overboard in expressing your amazement. That kid will spend the next few years of their life trying to impress you again. Was I that kid, I ask myself now as the adult that kids are now trying to impress. Were the adults around me that impressed, or were they humoring me in the manner I now humor most of the kids around me? At some point in between, we discover that no one, save that precious inner circle, cared near as much as we thought they did. Unless we were excessively attractive in that special pair of jeans, or incredibly unattractive, or awkward looking in them, no one cares what we wear. Even then, most people don’t notice near as much as we think. It’s unfair, because we knew if we were a star athlete, or movie star, more people would care. The only antidote to the ever-present unfairness of life is to get happy. Happiness is the best revenge, someone once said, and it is. You should live your life in such a way that someone says, “Vacation? You’re going on vacation? Your whole life is a vacation. I think people would pay hard cash to live one week of your life. You’re so happy, you make me sick.” And we’ll never get there, if all we’re worried about is how unfair life is.