Life isn't fair

Sometimes, life is difficult. Life is unfair.

Its always struck me as odd that that phrase - the sentiment that life is unfair - is somehow childish. That admitting this self-evident fact is naive to the point of deserving mockery. We take children at a young age and drum it into them that they should settle down, shut up, and accept unfairness as it comes. For an adult to say so is so unusual that it rarely passes without comment and, sadly, without a sense of scandal. They're playing outside of the rules; they're saying aloud what we're not meant to say. They aren't accepting what we as a society have accepted as 'just the way things are'. Pointing out unfairness correlates pretty well, for most of us, with immaturity.

Far be it from me to suggest that the world is fair. It patently isn't, and we should have no expectations that it should be. We live in a purposeless universe that is not attuned in the slightest to the plight of humanity; of the individual social, economic and sexual concerns of an individual out of five billion, of a single species out of millions on a single planet among countless billions. The numbers don't add up. I don't think this is what people mean by 'life isn't fair' though. After all, many millions of us believe that the great amoral disasters that we face - earthquakes, floods, storms, volcanic eruptions - are driven by purpose, that a god or gods have a plan that involves the wholesale and indiscriminate destruction of people and propety. God will know his own, indeed.

So life isn't fair, but it should be. More than that, it can be. Humanity alone out of any species we know of has harnessed its environment to dizzying heights. Throwing ourselves into space, bouncing invisible electronic signals around the world to communicate, manipulating the fundamental building blocks of life itself to create more productive crops, to give parenthood to those unable by genetic accident to have children. The things we have achieved are marvellous, truly staggering, but we have not achieved fairness. We are dissuaded from so early on to accept the pitiless random happenstance of the world that we live in that we fail to distinguish between unavoidable unfairness and unfairness that we have created and maintain.

Last year UK shoppers spent approximately four billion pounds on their credit cards at Christmas. That's £4,000,000,000,000 in longhand. Granted it's a tired old rote to go on about capitalist excess, especially as I type this on an expensive computer in a well-decorated house just before I head to town for a night out, but I think my own hypocrisy probably isn't so important in the grand scheme of things. I try not to spend frivolously, I give money to charity every month and I tend to buy the Big Issue (so should you - the reviews are tremendously honest!). It's kind of beside the point though - while individual effort is of course valuable, it's kind of like multinational corporations telling us to wash our clothes at 30 while throwing out billions of tonnes of pollutants into the atmosphere. We're important, not because we can necessarily make a difference, but because we can pressure those who can.

Yes, our gross consumerism means that shops open with Christmas stock in October but they operate like everyone else through supply and demand. Just because we can do our Christmas shopping that early doesn't mean we should. Just because it's there doesn't mean we have to buy it. Why not make your own birthday cards instead of buying them? You can't honestly tell me that mass-produced cards (featuring the two themes of "you're old!" and "you're going to be drunk soon!") are better than the ones you could make yourself. Why buy things you don't need at all? Why not suggest the company you work for gets involved in charity work? Life isn't fair, but that's not the way it has to be; we are advanced enough, civilised enough, to stop dismissing unfairness as a fact of life and start working towards something better.