Life is totally unfair.

You’ve heard this too many times in your lifetime: “life is unfair.” Maybe life was unfair when you were a kid because you were never invited to as many birthday parties as Suzy and you still hold a grudge against her to this day.

It’s a truism that you sometimes wish would be false.

But is life unfair to the same degree for everyone? The answer is probably “no.” Life treats people differently, and it’s obviously unfair.

To examine whether life is fair, we must first define fairness. It’s a standard that would differ depending upon your views, personal beliefs, and geographical location. There are variances on what we deem is “fair”, and this includes a whole set of criteria such as access to resources, money, wealth, beauty, health, opportunities, and peace. Ultimately, if you define fairness based on these metrics, you’d disagree with someone else who has different standards.

So life is unfair, maybe to an unequal degree for everyone. How do we change that?

1. How do we define, measure, and evaluate fairness?

We first have to define fairness. Many things in life are not fair. There is rampant inequality, and I just mentioned them in terms of income, wealth, health, opportunity, education, and even things like the physical and emotional characteristics that you are born with.

If you were complacent about inequality, you’d say that others just have bad luck and that’s why they’re unsuccessful and unhappy. But is there a better solution than just saying that it’s the reality and we have to accept it?

If there was a scale that measures fairness, it would resemble a Gaussian-like distribution. The yardstick by which we measure fairness includes both material and immaterial things. Most people have an average amount of advantages. There would be some outliers and these would be the people with the worst luck, and the people with the best luck. At the extreme, people either fail miserably in life, or soar through life with all the confidence and success that life brings them.

We want equal opportunity for ourselves, to have as much success, health and happiness, as everyone else.

Whether you are destined for a fair or unfair life begins even before you are born, because you can’t choose your lot in life. For example, your upbringing determines whether you had money during childhood to take music lessons, enroll in summer camp, have birthday parties, and clothes in the latest fashion.

Unfortunately you can’t choose where you were born, and the family you grew up with. You can’t choose your parents, or go back in time and change the way you were brought up. Most of what brings us good or bad luck is out of our control. So how do we take control and conquer our powerlessness over what happens to us?

2. Life is unfair when freedom of choice and autonomy are taken away.

We’re the most powerful when we’re independent, when the choices we make are made because we have the freedom to choose.

Not everyone has the same freedom. For example, it can depend on your geographical location, the political climate in that location, and whether it is a war-free zone. People can have different standards of what constitutes a fair life, depending on where they live in the world.

Life is especially unfair when people don’t follow the rules, when anything goes, when they’ve gained their advantages by unfair practices. We all want a level playing field, with the same equal starting point as everyone else.

There is a lot of competition because there are fewer resources, and not enough to go around. That inevitably leads people to get to where they are by being dishonest. Some people mistake dishonesty for ingenuity, meaning that finding ways to beat the competition takes creativity and invention.

In the struggle for power, most will lose.

Do we need hierarchy? Do we need leaders who are more powerful than us? If not, will everything descend into anarchy and chaos? And can laws control fairness?

3. We use laws in an attempt to control fairness.

But people who are corrupt escape punishment. They beat the system and rig the system so that there are winners and losers, and those who play by the rules end up getting punished.

Life is unfair because there is deep rooted inequality in every society.

Most societies are structured to be hierarchical because it’s the least chaotic way of living with order and peace. The opposite of this would be living in a world where everyone got what they wanted. That’s not possible because everyone wants different things, and these things clash and oppose each other.

An interesting research paper proposes that fairness is related to self-esteem and predictability. This is a good proposition because there’s nothing more demoralizing to your self-esteem than when you are always treated unfairly.

Loss of control means that everything is unpredictable. There’s nothing less unpowering, and hopeless, than feeling like you have no control over anything, and that no matter what you do, you can’t change anything. If you were to grade your satisfaction in life, the score would be higher if you think you’d been treated fairly.

You could say that people in power have the most aggression, and are the most assertive. These characteristics allow them to get what they want, and have things go their way.

People are successful because they’ve discovered the secret to how to get what they want. If someone is ultra successful, you can’t help but think that maybe they got there by dishonest means. Does dishonesty and lying pay off? Should we all be liars?

Sometimes, to gain power, people must display the worst characteristics, and this is unfair.

If you evaluated the characteristics of happy people who are satisfied with their lives, assertiveness would probably score high on the list.

4. What can we do to make life fair?

Everyone has challenges in life, but it’s the way that they react to them that allows them to overcome them and be successful. If you feel you have a lot of disadvantages, hopefully you’d feel compelled to take action and create a better future for yourself.

By recognizing this, only then will you make positive and lasting changes to your life.

To change your fortune in life, be more receptive to opportunities or actively seek them. If luck doesn’t come your way, create your own luck. Don’t passively wait for good things to happen to you, because you could be waiting forever. The people who are luckiest seize every opportunity that crosses their path.

There have been some strides in making life more equitable.

That’s when society is prosperous and flourishes, to the exclusion of those not lucky enough to benefit from it.

Equal opportunity is not open to everyone. Bad things happen to good people. Justice for all doesn’t have to be a faraway dream though.

There is positive collaboration, and people working together to implement systems that make things more fair. In the workplace, there are rules against discrimination, and there’s a call for greater equity and diversity. Progress is slow, though, and there’s still lots of work to be done.

In a utopia, or ideal world, there would be no distinction between classes and everyone would be treated fairly and equitably.

It’s true, life is unfair.

If life was fair, you’d get what you deserve and that’s not always the reality.

So if you think life is unfair, you’re not alone. Lots of people would commiserate.