A child is born today with a rare genetic condition that will require dozens of surgeries and a lifetime of medical care. In the next room over, a healthy child is born into a family with generational wealth and every possible advantage. Same hospital, same day, radically different destinies.
Your first instinct is probably to think:
"That's not fair."
But ask yourself, who or what exactly is supposed to ensure fairness in this scenario? What force in the universe is responsible for making sure genetic advantages and disadvantages are distributed according to merit? Which department of cosmic justice failed to intervene?
The uncomfortable truth is that fairness doesn't exist outside human consciousness. It's not a law of nature like gravity or thermodynamics. It's not embedded in the structure of reality like mathematics or physics. It's something we invented, something we impose on a world that operates by entirely different principles.
This realization changes everything about how you understand your place in the world and what you can reasonably expect from it.
The universe has no concept of fairness. Earthquakes don't choose their victims based on moral worth. Cancer cells don't consult a justice tribunal before selecting their host. The person who works sixteen hours a day may die in poverty while someone inherits millions for being born to the right parents. The devoted spouse gets betrayed while the cheater finds happiness.
None of this violates any natural law because there is no natural law requiring fairness.
Yet we've built entire civilizations around the opposite assumption. Our legal systems, economic theories, religious frameworks, and deepest relationships all rest on the belief that fairness is not just desirable but fundamental to how things should work. We rage against outcomes that violate our sense of justice as if we're witnessing glitches in reality's programming rather than reality operating exactly as designed.
This expectation is costing you more than you realize. In this post, you'll discover how the Stoics turned reality's harshest truth into their greatest advantage, and why the people who stop waiting for fairness become the ones who actually create it.
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