Unto Others

I believe that the secret to a happy life is to embrace unfairness.

Here are the things that, in my experience, cause people to be deeply unhappy:

1. A lack of self-worth; a sense that your life is a net negative for the world. The stain on the soul that comes from selfishness.
2. Expecting something that doesn’t happen.

That’s it. Those two categories encompass pretty much everything that makes people deeply unhappy. You can be miserable because you’re not doing the right things to keep your soul in shape, and you can be unhappy because you’ve projected the solutions to your unhappiness out into the world and the world failed to live up to that impossible ideal.

What does this have to do with unfairness?

Well, that means that in order to be happy, you have to embrace a contradiction. According to premise #1, in order to be happy you need to do things for others – you need to make the world better and treat people with kindness, honesty, and generosity. And according to premise #2, you need to do that without ever expecting that anyone else will do the same in return.

That’s pretty unfair!

But if you do it, here’s the thing: you will be happy.

All of my moments of unhappiness have come from straying from one of those two premises. I’ve been unhappy when I’ve treated others more poorly than I should have, and I’ve been unhappy when I’ve expected others to treat me better than they did. But both of those things are under my control.

The dark sickness of the spirit comes from the terrible trick your mind tries to play on you. Your mind says that because you are kind to the world, you should expect the world to be kind to you. And then the world says because the world wasn’t kind to you, you no longer have to be kind to the world.

And if you listen to those words and embrace them, you will be unhappy for the rest of your life. Perfect fairness is being a miserable bastard to the world forever, and getting miserable bastardry in return. That’s perfectly fair, and no way to live.

You must demand better from yourself than you expect from the world. If you do that – and never fall into the trap that they are in any way connected – then you will be happy. It isn’t fair, but it is good. It is good that your own happiness is so directly connected to things you can control. Do unto others not as you would have them do unto you, but do unto them far, far better than you would ever expect in return.

And be happy.