Why Your Parents Were Right: Nobody Ever Said Life Was Fair
By Derek Neighbors on December 21, 2025
Working-class America didn’t read the Stoics. They lived them.
My dad was white-collar. He gave us a comfortable life.
But his father, my grandfather, grew up during the Depression. Blue-collar through and through.
And those lessons? Dad never softened them. Never translated them into something more palatable for kids growing up with privilege.
He had two responses when we complained about unfairness:
Nobody ever said life was fair.
And when we whined about wanting something:
Want in one hand and shit in the other. See which gets fuller faster.
Depression-era wisdom, delivered unfiltered to kids who never missed a meal.
I didn’t appreciate it at the time. It sounded harsh, dismissive, cold. Now I realize it was philosophy disguised as tough love. And I’m grateful he never softened it. Because that working-class wisdom, forged in real scarcity, real difficulty, is what kept privilege from rotting into entitlement.
Unfairness exists. It’s real. It’s not your lever.
Here’s what I’ve noticed watching people build and watching people stay stuck: Nearly every successful person I know has eliminated “fair” from their vocabulary. Most stuck people still use it daily. The correlation isn’t coincidence.
“Fair” is the most dangerous word in your vocabulary because it transforms every obstacle into evidence of victimhood and every setback into proof you deserve better without earning it.
We’re living through the golden age of outsourced responsibility. Everyone’s searching for the system, the government, the institution that will finally make things fair. Nobody’s searching for what they can build with their own hands.
If you have fewer resources, the margin for error is smaller, but the obligation to govern your will doesn’t disappear.
The Pattern Nobody’s Naming
Before we go further, here’s what I mean in this piece:
- Fair (in this article): the belief that outcomes should match your sense of deserving. Not justice. Not morality. Just expectation.
- Agency: the practiced ability to choose action despite discomfort and circumstances.
- Excellence (arete): trained capacity, moral and practical, to do what the moment requires.
Justice is a virtue. But “it’s not fair” is usually not a justice claim, it’s a surrender ritual.
Quick Stoic frame:
- In your control: your judgment, your effort, your character.
- Not in your control: outcomes, other people, and whether “the system” cooperates.
Used wrong, the word “fair” is linguistic poison. Every time you use it as a reason to stop, you’re practicing victimhood. You’re training yourself to look for external validation instead of internal agency. And right now? The incentives reward it. Everyone’s got their favorite boogeyman, the 1%, the system, the media, the institutions. Anything to avoid the mirror.
Reality doesn’t negotiate. Markets don’t negotiate. Excellence doesn’t negotiate. The only thing that cares about “fair” is the part of you that wants permission to quit. And the incentives will hand you that permission all day long. They’ll validate your resentment, explain your circumstances, and promise that if we just fix the system, you won’t have to fix yourself.
Here’s the contradiction nobody wants to acknowledge:
You want agency over your life. But you judge circumstances by fairness.
You want self-sufficiency. But you’re waiting for systems to save you.
You want respect. But you’re outsourcing your responsibility.
These goals are incompatible. One requires accepting reality and building capacity. The other requires resenting reality and waiting for rescue.
The Five Patterns That Keep You Stuck
Pattern 1: The Comparison Trap
The behavior: Constantly measuring your circumstances against others.
The example: “It’s not fair they got promoted, they’ve been here less time than me.”
The truth: You’re using comparison to avoid asking what you need to become.
The Stoics had a word for external circumstances: adiaphora, indifferent. Your judgment about them creates your suffering, not the circumstances themselves. Fairness thinking turns every gap into grievance instead of information.
If you want the modern translation, read this: The Internal Locus Revolution. Same truth. Less Greek.
Pattern 2: The Waiting Game
The behavior: Believing you deserve outcomes without corresponding inputs, waiting for systems, institutions, or circumstances to change before you act.
The example: “It’s not fair I have to work this hard while others have advantages. The system should level the playing field first.”
The truth: You’re confusing deserving with entitled expectation. You’re outsourcing your power to the very systems you claim are broken.
The Stoics called it prohairesis, moral choice. The only thing you actually control is your effort and your character. The Stoics never waited for Rome to be fair. They built character regardless.
Wanting without doing is just complaining with extra steps. My dad was right.
Every moment spent waiting for external fairness is a moment NOT spent building internal capability. The math is brutal: rescue isn’t guaranteed, but the years pass anyway.
Pattern 3: The Excuse Manufacturing
The behavior: Using unfavorable circumstances as explanations for inaction, building an identity around what held you back instead of what you’re building forward.
The example: “It’s not fair I started with less, grew up poor, didn’t have connections. The deck is stacked against people like me.”
The truth: You’re using unfairness as sophisticated permission to stay small. The culture will applaud this. It’ll give you a victim badge and call it empathy. Meanwhile, you’re trading agency for sympathy.
Epictetus was born a slave, crippled by his master, became one of history’s great philosophers. Nobody fixed his circumstances. He transcended them through character.
If circumstances determined outcomes, Epictetus never happens. Neither does Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery and became one of the most influential voices for abolition and human dignity. Neither does Viktor Frankl, who survived the Holocaust and developed logotherapy in the concentration camps. Neither does Oprah Winfrey, born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a single teenage mother, who became one of the most influential media figures in history. Neither does anyone who actually built something worth having.
The pattern is clear: the people we most admire didn’t wait for fair. They built despite unfair. Waiting for fair circumstances is waiting forever. Building despite unfair circumstances is how excellence happens.
Pattern 4: The Resentment Cycle
The behavior: Nursing anger about past injustices instead of building present capacity.
The example: “It’s not fair what happened to me 5, 10, 20 years ago.”
The truth: You’re choosing to bleed energy into the unchangeable past instead of the controllable present.
Marcus Aurelius wrote:
The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
Resentment is drinking poison and waiting for circumstances to change. The Stoics understood this 2,000 years ago. The obstacle isn’t blocking your path. It IS the path.
Pattern 5: The Justice Fantasy (The Cultural Permission Structure)
The behavior: Believing the universe, the system, the government, or institutions owe you compensation for difficulty, that if we just identify the right villain, fairness will arrive.
The example: “After everything I’ve been through, I deserve… If they just fixed the system, taxed the rich, held the powerful accountable, then I could…”
The truth: You’re confusing cosmic justice with personal accountability. And the culture is selling you this confusion as enlightenment. It’ll tell you that demanding fairness is activism, that resentment is awareness, that waiting for systems to change is strategy.
It’s none of those things. It’s just expensive paralysis dressed up as principles.
The Stoics understood: nature is indifferent, virtue is the only good. Marcus Aurelius could have spent his life chasing “fair.” He chose character instead. Because fairness is a distraction from excellence.
Waiting for cosmic fairness guarantees you’ll wait forever. Waiting for systems to save you guarantees dependence. The culture will validate this waiting. It will never validate what you could have built while you waited. Those years don’t come back.
What Actually Works
Life doesn’t owe you fair. It offers you reality. That’s the only deal on the table. Take it or spend your life complaining about the unfairness of not getting a different deal.
Your circumstances are real, but they’re not your essence. Your essence is the part of you that can choose.
And here’s what nobody’s saying out loud: we’re living through a cultural moment where a lot of incentives profit from your victimhood. The more you identify with being held back, the more systems can sell you salvation. The more you focus on who’s got power over you, the less you notice the power you’re giving away.
Whatever you believe about politics, don’t outsource your will to it. This is about whether you’re building capability or curating grievances. Both take time. Both take energy. Only one compounds into freedom.
Yes, the incentives reward grievance. No, that doesn’t remove responsibility. It just means discipline costs more than it used to, and pays out even harder.
Even if the world is arranged badly, the soul can still be arranged well.
I grew up with advantages: white, male, educated parents, stable home. I could have used those advantages and still failed. Or I could have used fairness logic: “It’s not fair others expect more from me because I had advantages.”
The culture would have validated either direction, sympathy for struggling despite advantages, or anger at being expected to do more.
Dad’s wisdom cut through all of it: “Nobody’s asking about fair. What are you going to do?”
That question, “What are you going to do?”, is the only question that builds anything. Everything else is sophisticated waiting.
Here’s what I learned: The culture wants you dependent. It wants you waiting. It wants you focused on who has power over your life instead of what power you’re building in your life.
Because dependent people are predictable. They can be managed, marketed, and manipulated predictably. And they never become a threat to comfortable systems.
Self-sufficient people who build regardless of circumstances? Those are dangerous. They don’t need rescue. They don’t wait for permission. They don’t blame the right villain. They just build. And eventually, what they build becomes undeniable.
The Four-Step Method
Step 1: Eliminate “Fair” From Your Vocabulary (30 Days)
Every time you catch yourself saying or thinking “it’s not fair,” replace it with: “What do I control here?”
Track it. You’ll be shocked how often you use this word. Each usage is a moment you chose victimhood over agency.
Step 2: Audit Your Circumstances Without Judgment
List your advantages (even if you didn’t earn them). List your disadvantages (even if they’re unfair). Now ask: Given THIS reality, what’s the move?
The Stoic question: What would virtue do with these exact circumstances?
Step 3: Reframe Unfairness as Information
“They got promoted with less experience” → What do they do that I don’t?
“I didn’t get their head start” → What capability can I build that doesn’t require a head start?
“This shouldn’t be this hard” → What is this difficulty teaching me?
Shift from “This shouldn’t be” to “This is—now what?”
Step 4: Practice Working-Class Stoicism
When you want something: Put it in one hand.
When you act on it: Track what actually happens.
Wanting gets you nothing. Doing gets you everything.
Dad was right. Again.
The Choice That Changes Everything
Here’s what’s universal: everyone gets the same responsibility for their will, even when their options are worse.
You can operate in reality or you can operate in fairness. One builds excellence. One builds resentment. One builds capability. One builds dependence. One makes you dangerous. One makes you predictable.
Choose.
Right now, the culture is selling dependence as wisdom. It’s telling you that identifying the system that’s holding you back is the same as building capacity that can’t be held back.
It’s not.
One path creates comfortable victims who know exactly who to blame. The other creates uncomfortable builders who stopped asking about blame and started asking about capability.
The first group spends decades waiting for systems to change. The second group spends decades building things systems can’t ignore.
The greatest gift my parents gave me wasn’t advantages. It was the refusal to let me use unfairness as an excuse. “Nobody ever said life was fair” wasn’t cruelty. It was liberation. It was the gift of agency in a culture increasingly addicted to victimhood.
Stop waiting for fair. Stop waiting for systems to save you. Stop waiting for the right villain to be identified so your circumstances can finally change.
Start operating in truth. Start building capacity. Start becoming the kind of person who makes things happen regardless of who has power, who has advantages, who the system favors.
Final Thoughts
The difference between stuck and unstoppable is whether you’re focused on what should be or what actually is. The difference between dependent and dangerous is whether you’re waiting for rescue or building regardless.
Depression-era wisdom. Stoic philosophy. Same truth, different packaging: the universe is indifferent, circumstances are adiaphora, and wanting in one hand gets you exactly what you deserve, nothing.
The culture will call this harsh. Call it whatever you want.
Just know: people who eliminate “fair” from their vocabulary become ungovernable. And ungovernable people build things the comfortable can’t stop.
Ungovernable = not ruled by comfort, resentment, or the need for permission.
Ready to stop waiting for fair and start building capacity that can’t be ignored? MasteryLab is where people done with excuses come to become ungovernable.
