There are 4 fairnesses of life: Physical fairness, hurt fairness, future fairness, and happiness fairness.
1. Physical fairness
Everyone goes through illness and death. Everyone lives for a couple of decades. Everyone can be killed with a bullet or even a punch.
No matter if it’s the richest or poorest, most powerful or most powerless.
2. Hurt fairness
If there is fairness, it’s everyone has been hurt, and everyone has hurt someone else.
We talked about hurt unfairness, which is to heal, we have to forgive the people who hurt us.
Hurt fairness is everyone gets hurt. It’s not I hurt you, you hurt me, but I hurt you, you hurt him, he hurt her…
In a family, hurt is passed down in generations. Your parents hurt you, you hurt your kids.
Everyone is the fruit of their environment, and everyone’s environment is not perfect. So again, accepting and forgiving is the way out.
3. Future fairness
We talked about future unfairness, which is we don’t know what bad things will happen to us. But the fairness of this is, no one knows. When comes to the future, everyone is the same blind dog as you and I.
“The majority of what’s happening at any given moment in the global economy can be tied back to a handful of past events that were nearly impossible to predict. The most common plot of economic history is the role of surprises.”
– Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money
4. Happiness fairness
Happiness fairness is the most important fairness of life, it’s the biggest curse and the biggest gift of this world.
Happiness fairness means if the goal of life is to be happy, then no one is absolutely happier than another. Because:
1) Human has a basic happiness level that rarely changes with external circumstances.
We have running water, internet, iPhones, computers, cars, air conditioners, and infinite choices, but are we all happier than our ancestors?
The child you have no money, no cars, no house, no girlfriend, but are you happier now than your child self?
The boss of a company is the richest, the most famous, and most powerful, but is he necessarily happier than all his 500 employees?
A major contributor to our unhappiness is external material, but now you know that these material stuff is not that closely related to happiness, isn’t this liberating?
2) No one’s life is perfect. The people you envy envies part of your life too.
Every gain comes with a loss.
The boss of a company needs to deal with a lot of things and bear heavy accountability.
The rich are often worried about their money.
The famous envies your normal life, you can go shopping without makeup and without being stalked.
The officials envy you can make mistakes as you want without being screwed by opponents.
So from a happiness perspective, no matter how glorious it seems on the surface, no one is absolutely happier than another.
Your friend who married a rich guy and looks happy in every Instagram photo is either happy before marrying the guy or is faking it. Because
Happiness is an ability, not luck.
Good news is, ability can be learned.
Hope we can learn to be happier, together.
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